Duty to Warn

"What's more moderate than exploring the truth?  Is there really partisanship in truth?...We don't need to be afraid to use the word impeachment.  It is the process that was set up.  It's not a bad word.  It stands for accountability.  It is the system of justice in our political system…There's nothing radical in that." -- TONY TRUPIANO

While no congressional incumbent has yet introduced articles of impeachment or a resolution of inquiry into grounds for impeachment of Bush and Cheney, numerous 2006 candidates are committed to doing so.  I know because they're contacting ImpeachPAC, a political action committee I work for which was recently created to support pro-impeachment candidates.

Newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers Wednesday about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he “said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ‘the president of the United States is all-powerful,’ and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.”

AP added: “Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ‘otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.’”

Bob Woodward probably hoped that the long holiday weekend would break the momentum of an uproar that suddenly confronted him midway through November. But three days after Thanksgiving, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” a question about the famed Washington Post reporter provoked anything but the customary adulation.

“I think none of us can really understand Bob’s silence for two years about his own role in the case,” longtime Post journalist David Broder told viewers. “He’s explained it by saying he did not want to become involved and did not want to face a subpoena, but he left his editor, our editor, blind-sided for two years and he went out and talked disparagingly about the significance of the investigation without disclosing his role in it. Those are hard things to reconcile.”

An icon of the media establishment, Broder is accustomed to making excuses for deceptive machinations by the White House and other centers of power in Washington. His televised rebuke of Woodward on Nov. 27 does not augur well for current efforts to salvage Woodward’s reputation as a trustworthy journalist.

The stench of panic in Washington hangs like a winter fog over Capitol Hill and drifts down Pennsylvania Avenue. The panic stems from the core concern of every politician in the nation's capital: survival. The people sweating are Republicans, and the source of their terror is the deadly message spelled out in every current poll: Bush's war on Iraq spells disaster for the Republican Party in next year's midterm elections.

Take a mid-November poll by SurveyUSA: In only seven states did Bush's current approval rating exceed 50 percent. These consisted of the thinly populated states of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi. In 12 states, including California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Michigan, his rating was under 35.

You have to go back to the early 1970s, when a scandal-stained Nixon was on the verge of resignation, to find numbers lower than Bush's. Like Bush, Nixon had swept to triumphant reelection in 1972. Less than two years later, he turned the White House over to Vice President Ford and flew off into exile.

Massive Election Day irregularities are emerging in reports from all over Ohio after the introduction of Diebold's electronic voting in nearly half of the Buckeye State’s counties. A recently released report by the non-partisan General Accountability Office warned of such problems with electronic voting machines.

E-voting machine disasters

Prior to the 2005 election, electronic voting machines from Diebold and other Republican voting machine manufacturers were newly installed in 41 of Ohio’s 88 counties. The Dayton Daily News reported that in Montgomery County, for example, “Some machines began registering votes for the wrong item when voters touched the screen correctly. Those machines had lost their calibration during shipping or installation and had to be recalibrated. . . .”

Steve Harsman, the Director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections (BOE), told the Daily News that the recalibration could be done on site, but poll workers had never performed the task before.

One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process - and democracy itself.

But you won't learn this by reading the Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper that conducted the poll just prior to Ohio's Nov. 8 election. The paper's public affairs editor conceded to me that the poll results the Dispatch wrote about, wrongly indicating massive public support for several proposed constitutional amendments, were, in essence, the journalistic equivalent of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

"Much like the American space program, both our triumphs and our shortcomings are out there for all to see," Darrel Rowland said in an e-mail. Unlike NASA, however, which did manage to find that faulty O-ring, the newspaper's powers that be don't seem particularly interested in learning how their big public flop occurred. "We'll certainly double-check the poll mechanics," he said, "but see no reason to discontinue a methodology that's proven accurate for decades."

Since Bill Moyers retired, I watch PBS pretty rarely. I remembered why when I saw the NOVA special on New Orleans, "The Storm that Drowned a City." It gave some useful chronology, but in an hour-long program on the genesis and history of the storm, they avoided raising even the possibility that the Bush administration may have contributed to the disaster.

I waited and waited for discussion of global warming's potential role in fueling Katrina's ferocity. Finally, near the end, this science-focused show spent maybe a minute quoting a scientist suggesting a possible link, and then quickly undermined his words by having the prime expert they kept coming back to dismiss the connection. They didn't even try to link Katrina to the broader pattern of global climate change-related disasters, like increases in tornadoes, floods, droughts, and forest fires. (A year before Katrina, Swiss the world's second largest reinsurance company, warned of a potential $150 billion annual toll from these kinds of disasters). The NOVA show just kept repeating the same loop of scientists saying, we dodged the bullet before, but it's headed for us now.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Since the political world ranges from poor to icky these days, you may think we are gratitudinally challenged this Thanksgiving. But a mere soupcon of sunny optimism goes a long way toward getting us to dwell on how lucky we are. We are abundantly blessed with lemons. Let us make lemonade.

I am grateful for the extraordinary number of readers who sent along their ideas on How to Fix All This. The ideas ranged from the sublime to the practical, from the universal and global to the price of milk. The country is teeming with good ideas, all of which we need.

I was particularly intrigued by this thought from peace activist Gen Van Cleve: It's 2009 and the Bush people are gone, leaving in their wake fury, suspicion, distrust -- basically, our name is mud, whether we've left Iraq by then or not. Most of the rest of the world considers us: A) insane, B) imperialist and C) morons. What to do?

Remember when John F. Kennedy announced that America would go to the moon within 10 years? That we would put all our technological, scientific and government expertise into making a grand project happen? And we did.

When Thanksgiving arrives, the media coverage is mostly predictable. Feature stories tell of turkeys and food drives for the needy. We hear about why some people, famous and unknown, say they feel thankful. And, of course, holiday advertising campaigns launch via TV, radio and print outlets.

Like our own responses to Thanksgiving, the repeated media messages are apt to be contradictory. Answers to basic questions run the gamut: How much time and money should we spend on the holiday dinner compared to helping the less fortunate? Is this really the time to count our blessings -- or yield to ads that tell us how satisfied we’ll be after buying the latest brand-new products and services?

Under the surface, some familiar media themes are at cross purposes this time of year. Holiday celebrations that speak to the need for compassion and spiritual connection are frequently marked by efforts and expenditures that point in opposite directions. Within the media echo chambers, a lot of the wallpaper is the color of money.