Why George W. Bush Should Have Been Impeached

At one point during his presidency, I had listed as many as 30 reasons that George W. Bush should have been impeached. In my memory, no President other that Richard M. Nixon had been more deserving of that dubious distinction. Here, I’ve gathered together the main reasons I recall, more than a decade later.

Originally published 2015

Remember, a sitting President can be impeached for any reason whatever. The offenses do not have to be illegal.

The following is a partial list of reasons why George Bush should have been impeached.
(That it never happened, sadly, suggests that our system of government is no longer what it is claimed to be.)

1. For going to war with Iraq under false pretenses.
2. For failure to run the intelligence agency properly, and forcing a false conclusion
   –whether out of malice or incompetence, either of which is impeachable.
3. For failure to take any kind of responsibility after the fact, saying instead
   “you saw the same (cherry-picked) intelligence that we did”
   (even though the responsibility for gathering that intelligence was, in fact, his).
4. For setting aside the rights of the citizenry in a supposed “time of war”.
5. For the following pattern of behavior, suggesting a deliberate failure to respond:
   • Republican Florida gets hit by a hurricane.
     Aid is immediate.
   • Democratic New Orleans gets buried by one.
     Aid is slow and in many cases non-existent, even 10 years later.
   • Republican New York/New Jersey gets hit by a hurricane.
     The claim to have “learned their lesson” from Katrina. Aid is swift.
   • Democratic California gets hit by the San Simeon earthquake. Damage estimates top $220m.
     Ferderal aid is slow in coming, and only 1/10 of that amount is allocated, at slightly over $20m.
6. For failing to understand and veto the “Clean Air Bill” that actually reduced regulations on emmissions.
7. For failing to understand and veto legislation with a similarly misleading title that allowed drilling off the coast of California.
8. For complete and utter failure to speak clearly. For stuttering, stammering, mispronouncing words, and pausing at the wrong places in his teleprompted speeches, at times changing the meaning of the text in the process, and thereby exposing the entire nation to ridicule, by virtue of the undeniable fact that we have a demonstrated capacity to elect a congenital idiot to run the country.
9. For being a figurehead, allowing Dick Cheney to run the government — because Dick Cheney was not elected President.
10. For acting as though he had a mandate to enact sweeping reforms, when in fact he won by a minuscule percentage over Al Gore, in a single state — a margin so small that voter registration fraud could easily have accounted for it. (If the margin is large enough, voter fraud, while deplorable, can be ignored. But in this case, the practices his party was known for could easily have determined the outcome — and even then might not have, if Al Gore had chosen to fight.)
11. For failing to understand the concept of climate change, much less do anything about it.
12. For allowing the estate tax to be repealed, thereby creating an “artistocracy of wealth” for the first time in the history of the nation — the lack of which was responsible for much of this nation’s greatness because, in its absence, “equal opportunity” was a reality.
13. For throwing out the Geneva convention and authorizing the torture of prisoners. (Was it necessary? Did it produce results? Did it produce false confessions and “noise” in the intelligence-gathering process? These are questions that need to be answered — although the majority of evidence already suggests that the “hard” approach is largely ineffective.)
14. For undeniably throwing away the huge amount of international goodwill that was ours after 9-11, as a result of the torture we engaged in.
15. For making the American people a party to his deceptions.
16. For dragging the country into a multi-year war, draining resources and costing lives, after promising with a completely straight face that it would be over in a matter of months.
17. For putting billions of dollars into companies owned by Cheney, in order to fight that war.
18. For defunding PBS, and for opening the door to the corporate advertising they were then forced to take in, to continue in operation.
19. For “losing” 22 million emails, including the ones that explained how we got into a war with Iraq.
20. For failing to comply with Judiciary Committe subpoenas to provide the same.
    1. Source: George W. Bush had a private email server, like Hillary Clinton, at Quora.
       Many of the emails to do with the Iraq war are unavailable, lost, or missing. When efforts were made to retrieve them the Judiciary Committee subpoenas were ignored. There is evidence of deliberate criminal behavior and a coverup. The chairman called the president’s actions “Nixonian stonewalling”. Two White House aides were found in contempt but no penalties were ever handed down. With Obama taking office the clock was run out.
    2. (Continued) The committee’s final report on the matter was blunt: “[T]his subversion of the justice system has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out precisely what happened. The reasons given for these firings were contrived as part of a cover-up, and the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort.”
    3. Obama did not pursue the matter choosing to focus on the economy instead. Because, in the words of the author, “Democrats don’t, as a rule, use the legal system to punish political opponents. They don’t launch politically inspired investigations, harass the opposition with conspiracy theories and innuendo, or write books about nonexistent scandals.”
    4. For more detail: George W. Bush’s White House “lost” 22 million emails

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