back that train up. Congress didn’t drop anything. they picked up the ball and ran with it. They voted for the war and continued to fund it. The same goes for the citizens of the United States. They voted Bush into a second term. All the vitriol about lying, torture, and civil rights infringements went out the window when it came time to deal with it. The war has consistently been voted up as has FISA.
There’s irony in a political platform that embraces change when the voting record is in step with the President. If Congress isn’t changing where does that leave Obama and International doctrine? the Primary Obama said Iran was a tiny country that poses little threat in comparison to Russia. The Candidate Obama says it threatens us all. In the space of 4 months he has put military force with Iran back on the table. This will be looming large on the horizon in 2009. Would be nice to know where the candidates really stand before the election.
Did you miss the 2006 elections? I think that was a big step away from the President.
Dude, where did this come from? How is this relevant to Bush lying?
Nitpick - It was Madison in 1812. Though I don’t recall him lying about that war. The people wanted that war since Adams was president. Both Adams and Jefferson even tried their hardest to stop it from happening. Madison finally had to cave in.
I think you need to concede that not every conservative is a paragon of virtue. Any movement is going to have some bad apples. And Bush, unfortunately, is one of them.
This not a matter of ideology - it’s a matter of the evidence. The evidence that Bush lied about Iraq is significantly stronger than the evidence that Johnson lied about Vietnam. But there will never be absolute proof of either event. But pretty much everyone believes that Johnson lied about Vietnam and that will be the conclusion about Bush and Iraq as well.
Part of the point of the war was to show that big business and their allies will allow the public to play here and there with the media when nothing big is at stake. But introduce something high-stakes and, as demonstrated, the US media will be regimented into supine obedience. GOP is happy with that.
Truth is also important in its own right, apart from being a standard we like to hold elected officials to.
Had Bush been truthful: No war. To wit:
“Now, the red state base is crying out for revenge on Arabs and there is inconclusive and slight evidence of a danger brewing in Iraq. So that’s reason enough.”
Exactly. As the evidence mounts, it is always possible to construct ever more fanciful scenarios where Bush was not lying / Creationism / No global warming / &etc. Rational people do not make assessments that favour the extremities of unlikelihood.
E.g The evidence that Bush lied is in the same ballpark of value as that showing Clinton to have lied. Yet, without exception those who deny the former will assert the latter.
You’re missing the main point. Which is that the very first step is to undo the Bush presidency and bring the US into the community of nations that observe the rule of law. That’s be nice, then we can talk about consequences and statutes.
We don’t seem to have a problem with that here in Germany - Section 80 of the Criminal Code (English translation/original text) has been in force for decades, not been politicised and has been pretty uncontroversial. IIRRC private complaints against the then government for participating in the Kosovo intervention did not lead to an indictment.
What’s with the contention that we ordinary citizens must take our chances with the criminal justice system but members or agents of the government need to be protected from it, anyway?
Please give evidence that Bush indeed lied as opposed to simply making a mistake. Also, keep in mind, if we are keeping with the OP and talking about prosecution, we need hard evidence. Not simply your feelings that Bush is the devil himself.
For years we heard how Bush is a dunce who can’t complete a sentence, but on the other hand he is an evil mastermind that can lead the whole country to war on a lie…
You don’t have to be an evil mastermind to show congress only the molehill to evidence that supports your case, instead of the mountain that goes against it.
Now I only have a couple of minutes because I have to get ready, but on my 30 second google search I found these:
I cannot speak for Blalron but my notion of what he is on about is that is not enough.
Congress has the power to toss toss the President out of office. Great. But essentially the President seems above the law. As long as whatever the President does, as long as it is part of his official duties, seems immune from any legal repercussions (aside from losing his job as President).
Forgetting the issue with Bush for a moment is there nothing a President can do that you would find reprehensible enough to toss him in jail for? What if a President instructs the CIA to covertly plant a nuke in Zurich because of unfair trade practices over chocolate were harming the US economy? As you would have it the best we can hope for is the President will get removed from his job.
Yes that is an absurd hypothetical but the point stands. Presumably no one is above the law in this country but that seems to be the case here.
Congress can hold the President, or anyone else, in contempt and it is against the law to lie to Congress already. This is not about lying, this is about proving lies and further being able to execute on the law; the DA of DC has refused in the past to serve subpoenas to compel the attendance of witnesses to Congress including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Rove; he was a Bush appointee.
We don’t need additional laws. We need a less politicized process for executing the laws we already have. One that is party-independent.
LBJ didn’t lie- which is the big problem with the OP’s suggestion…
LBJ recorded many of his most important discussions. Those tapes are now widely available. And one thing they show is that LBJ was NOT lying about what happened at Tonkin Gulf. Rather, he had mixed evidence and wasn’t SURE what had happened. In the immediate aftermath of the alleged incident, LBJ and his aides weren’t laughing, “Yeehaw, nowwe can have the big war we wanted.” They were frantically trying to figure out exactly what happened.
In later years, a demoralized Johnson was recorded wondering if anything had really happened, and if the whole war wasn’t a mistake.
So, should Johnson have gone to prison? If so, why would anybody but a pacifist ever run for President?
Presidents have to make tough decisions in a short time, sometimes with incomplete sets of facts.
I think the problem is undeclared wars. Much as I despise Bush, and would like to see him shot for treason, I blame Congress. The U.S. Congress hasn’t declared war since 1941; it’s abandoned its Constitutional duty to make that determination, and several generations have grown up with the concept of executive war, where Congress votes a resolution handing over its war-making power to the President. Sucks.
Bush was NOT forced to make a decision in a short time. He worked up to it over the course of over a year.
While one could say no set of facts on such issues could ever be truly “complete” Bush did have plenty of evidence before him about what was going on and all of it pointed to Hussein/Iraq not being a threat. There was no credible evidence, none, that Hussein was an actual threat to the US in any fashion.
Bush spun or outright lied about what evidence they were given to make the case for war.
Note the specific reference to WMD. [ul][li]Rockefeller voted for the AUMF.[]He did so based on the belief that Iraq posed a threat with WMD.[]The conclusion that Iraq posed a threat with its WMD was generally supported by the intelligence available[]Rockefeller now claims Bush misled him[]Rockefeller is the liar, not Bush[/ul][/li]Regards,
Shodan
While I wrote about two of the powers Congress has, I didn’t mean that the President is immune form any other legal actions. Anyone, including the President, is subject to the law.
What’s the goal here? If it’s to prevent an unnecessary war, then the powers I described are the appropriate ones. If it’s to go after a President, then keep in mind that George Bush is just one man. Look at the longer view. Do you think we need such a law to protect ourselves from Barack Obama or John McCain?
Why trust only 12 Americans when a panel of 300 Million was polled to give the guy that authority.
Sadly, we as a nation made a mistake of twice empowering Bush.
Elections have consequences. Everything Bush did was completely legal. He got authorization from Congress and executed his Constitutional authority. The only way to accomplish your goal is to force the president to stand before Congress, raise his right hand, take an oath, and be forced to justify his call to war under penalty of perjury.
I don’t support this idea. We pick the presidents. We gotta live with them. We all knew there were multiple justifications for Bush’s call to war (WMD, regional stability, spread of democracy, humanitarian crisis, “he tried to kill my dad!” etc.) No purported lie absolves us of the role the nation played in supporting Bush.