Swirling around the edges of Bush and Gang, the persistent question of impeachment.
I'm not sure, but it seems that as the curtain closes on Bush's presidency, more and more revelations about the hoodwinking of America.
If Clinton could be impeached for obstruction of justice on a matter of bedroom politics, do the lies and manipulations of the Bush Administration with regard to WMDs and Iraq constitute an impeachable offense? Is Bush a war criminal?
I'm confident that history will reveal the Bush administration to be the worst, rife with self-righteousness and worse. I have no doubt that the Neo-Cons and Theo-Cons knew full-well what they were doing - a rabid effort to take over Middle Eastern oil for American imperial interests.
Did Bush know this?
Some of the time, I'm convinced that was a pawn in their hands, a not-to-bright Texas weed wacker with an Ivy League pedigree bought by Daddy.
Then, I wonder - is he the proverbial country lawyer?
But, then, every country lawyer I've known (and I lived in Oklahoma for 12 years) were utterly bright, and it wasn't long before their skill emerged ... I've yet to see a shred of skill in Bush and have never heard him speak with any down-home eloquence, but only a stumbling rhetoric filled with schoolyard posturing, phrases memorized - seemingly without comprehension.
McCain offers nothing more - though a man of intelligence, his positions are obscurely imperialist, and stung by Vietnam, he's going to fight that war all over again, this time in Iraq, fulfilling a mythical complaint: if only the politicos had left the military alone, Vietnam could have been won (whatever that means).
Which reminds me, having just celebrated the Fourth of July and reading the Gettysburg Address - oh, to have a patriot like Lincoln, a man of breadth and profound sympathies.
To know that patriotism without international regard is no patriotism, but a betrayal of one's nation. Real patriotism always had large boundaries.
We would do well to study Reinhold Niebuhr's work on nationalism - what he described as a "sublimated egoism - the narrow-minded substitute for true patriotism, a substitute that always makes the wrong decision and leads a nation down a destructive pathway.
Niebuhr writes: The truth is that every immediate loyalty is a potential danger to higher and more inclusive loyalties, and an opportunity for the expression of a sublimated egoism (Moral Man and Immoral Society).
What we have seen with Bush and Gang is an unrestrained limited loyalty, and the usual counter-voices of church and philosophy have been silent far too long.
The weapon used by the Neo-Cons to silence criticism has been the patriotic label. To raise a question or voice a doubt, immediately the "unpatriotic" label was hurled with forceful effectiveness. Anyone who saw the king to be naked chose silence for fear of being labeled unpatriotic in a time when Americans were demonstrating their all too common lack of intelligence. After 9/11, fearfulness ruled the day, wiretapping and Orwellian newspeak ruled the night - and this great Republic teetered on the edge of madness.
But God's mercy is real, and I believe that God's mercy is enabling our nation to recover its balance, to regain an honest appraisal of our place in history and our need for allies. We cannot go it alone; it's foolishness to ever think so.
And the king has been naked for a long time.
May those with a voice, and good eyes, call it for what it is. The king is naked, and we have been seriously misled. But let's tell the whole truth: we've been misled because too many of us wanted to be misled. We American's love the smell of napalm in the morning.
When we needed a real leader, we got a charade, and a parade of looney tunes.
Is Bush impeachable?
Only time will tell ... proceedings against Bush and Gang may be needed to exorcise the demons that have long held sway in our national psyche.
Yet goodness has its own powers, too, and power enough to heal the wounds and put this nation back on track.
Perhaps time and history will provide their own history, relegating Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and Cheney to the dust bin of irrelevance - and for them, that may be punishment enough. But whatever happens, don't buy their books, unless they dedicate their earnings to the care of American veterans.
