Big Party in Ciudad Vleeptron 7 November 2006 starting around 11 pm USA Eastern Time

Click 2x for BIGGER!!!!!!

Okay okay actually the new 110th Congress
will be sworn in on the first week
of January 2007, and THEN the impeachment
hearings will start, but Bob's Big Party
will take place as scheduled.

Here in Ciudad Vleeptron, everybody's always talking about impeaching and removing Resident George Bush. Nuns and plumbers want him impeached, amateur mathematicians and astronomers want him impeached, gay sheepboys want him impeached ("Sneedziqerooleeee Mountain" just won six Ooooooooooscars, including Best Camping Equipment and Best Old Pickup Truck), orthodontists want him impeached, and every musician in the Philharmonia Dwingeloo-2 (except that idiot who plays the zimbalon when they do "Hary Janos") wants him impeached. The Poortown Diner now has a pastry called Impeach The Bun, and it flies out of the kitchen like hotcakes every breakfast while all the customers talk about nothing else but impeachment.

The headline down below from The Sunday Times of London yells about America's growing "Impeach Bush" chorus. Here in the Dwingeloo-2 Galaxy, Wolfgang Amadeus Ludwig von Franz Zynqqq has actually written an "Impeach Bush Chorus," an oratorio for the Hoon & Yobbo Tabernacle Choir -- 933 men, women, brenviiiiixi, and little schoolboys whose voices haven't changed yet, and if we can fix the Zeta Beam before the premiere, Dawn Upshaw will be the featured soloist. Here's a sneak peek of the libretto:

Mezzo-Sopranos:
He's dumb as rocks
He hangs with jocks

Basso-Profundos:
He smells like my gym socks
He smells like rancid lox

Boys' Choir:
Lock him in the stocks!
Lock him in the stocks!

The Vleeptron Justice Ministry is always talking about the USA Constitution's First Ten Amendments, more commonly called The Bill of Rights. But here's a bit of Constitutional Poetry that only gets mentioned Once in a Blue Moon.

Article II
Section 4. The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Somehow or other, by the time of the first impeachment (President Andrew Johnson, who'd been Abraham Lincoln's vice-president), Congress had squeezed the following details out of II.4:

* First the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee holds public hearings, subpoenas sworn witnesses (subject to perjury charges), examines subpoenaed documents and other evidence, and then draws up and votes on Articles of Impeachment.

* If a majority of the Committee votes to send the Articles to the full House, the full House votes on the Articles.

* If a majority approves the Articles of Impeachment, a trial will be held in the U.S. Senate. The Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court presides over the trial. At the end of the trial, the Senators vote to convict and remove the president, or to acquit him.

Andrew Johnson had his Senate Trial, and by a narrow margin, was found not guilty, and served out the remainder of his term.

Nixon never had a Senate trial, or even a vote by the full House. After the Judiciary Committee approved Articles of Impeachment (one article associated with Nixon's conduct of the War in Vietnam didn't pass), it was clear from the votes of leading members of his own Republican party that he would be found guilty in a Senate trial.

By this time his presidency was crippled and paralyzed, he could no longer effectively govern, and in America's streets there were massive anti-Nixon and anti-war demonstrations that were growing increasingly -- uhh, rowdy, something like what's going on in France right now. He resigned, the only president ever to do so.

(And about 20 of his closest cronies went to prison, including giggle his first Attorney General giggle hi there Gonzales hi Ashcroft. This time if a Cabinet secretary goes down, it would most likely be Rumsfeld. But Condoleezza Rice might also prove vulnerable for her activities as National Security Adviser in the run-up to the Iraq War. Kissinger dodged the indictment bullet, but he hadn't been involved in the White House campaign fundraising and dirty tricks scandals. But a Bush impeachment will focus very specifically on the National Security Adviser's official activities.)

Right now, Bush is safe from impeachment, because Republicans control both houses of Congress. One specific detail of this means that every committee in the House of Representatives is chaired by a Republican, and the committee Chair has the power to refuse to let the committee consider any piece of business or hold any hearing. So a Bush impeachment faces a dead end.

For now.

In November, every member of the House of Representatives must run for re-election. The new Congress could very likely be controlled by Democrats.

Which doesn't automatically mean that their first order of business will be to start an impeachment hearing. Democrats have reasons to be scared to death of trying to impeach Bush, particularly of trying and failing. American voters were furious at the waste of time of Clinton's impeachment and trial. The federal government stopped dead in the water for a year because of an extramarital blowjob, and the White House was focused on nothing else than defending the President from possible removal from office.

But this time around, things are different, and getting differenter.

As the story below documents, Americans screaming for Bush's impeachment are no longer a few marginalized, goofy-looking full-time pissed-off political activists.

Mom and dad and Sister Susie and Uncle Rodney and the dentist and the guy who owns the hardware store are writing e-mails to their Congressman and Congresswoman calling for Bush's impeachment.

Ordinarily, the Congress member's computer software churns out:

Dear Constituent,

Thank you very much for sharing your concerns with me. I am always interested in hearing the concerns of my constituents. Please feel free to write me any time you have concerns. I regret that this office receives so many e-mails that I cannot answer each one of them.

Sincerely,

Congresswoman Lucy Lunkfish

That always pisses me off. Betcha it pisses off lots of other people who write their Congress member, too.

And on Tuesday 7 November 2006, all the pissed-off Americans 18 years old or older can show their Congress member just how pissed off they are, in secret, without using their names, or sending an e-mail that no one ever reads.

As far as I can figure out, almost every member of Congress would rather have their sex organs removed with a rusty can lid without anesthetic than lose their job and the great gym and the limos and all the neat trips to Europe and the fantastic pension and the free golf trips to the Caribbean on corporate jets. These jerks would do ANYTHING to stay in office forever. They are so desperate to keep their jobs that

* they might even feel forced to give their voters a straight answer

* they might even work up the nerve to call for impeaching Resident George Bush

You think Cindy Sheehan is nutty?

Well, it's almost time for the annual Nut Harvest. Last year, impeachment nuts were very rare.

This year, just in time for the November elections, we just might get a record crop of Impeachment Nuts. Enough to fill the downtown streets of Washington DC, New York City, Topeka Kansas, San Francisco, Dallas Texas, Boise Idaho. Some of them might even be wearing suits and ties and uncomfortable undergarments.

Pretty nutty idea, huh? Were you watching the nightly news in 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973? You ought to check out that Ancient History.

~ ~ ~

The Sunday Times (London UK)
Sunday 19 March 2006

‘Impeach Bush’
chorus grows

Sarah Baxter, Washington

THE movement to impeach President George W Bush over the war on terror began with a few tatty bumper stickers on the back of battered old Volvos and slogans such as "Bush lied, people died" on far-left websites. But as Democrat hopes rise of gaining control of Congress this autumn, dreams of impeaching Bush are no longer confined to the political fringe.

A poll last week found that voters, by 50% to 37%, would prefer the Democrats to win control of Congress. If Bush’s opponents find themselves in a position of power, the temptation to humiliate him is likely to be irresistible.

A taste of the battle to come was provided last week by Senator Russ Feingold, a popular choice for the 2008 presidential nomination among Democrat anti-war activists. He proposed a motion of censure against Bush for authorising the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans suspected of links to terrorism without a court warrant.

Feingold gave notice that the party should stop "cowering" before Bush on national security issues. "If there’s any Democrat out there who can’t say the president has no right to make up his own laws, I don’t know if that Democrat really is the right (presidential) candidate," he said.

Plenty of his Senate colleagues ducked for cover, fearful of alienating either party activists or swing voters. The eavesdropping issue is one of the few hot-button topics where Bush has public support. One leading supporter of Hillary Clinton acknowledged ruefully: "It’s hard to beat the argument, ‘If Al-Qaeda is on the line, we want to be listening.’"

Clinton, the party’s presidential frontrunner, hid last week from reporters who wanted to question her on the censure motion while she was attending a Democrat lunch at the Senate. Most Democrats would rather keep their options open on impeachment than pronounce one way or another.

Republicans are practically begging them to "bring it on" in the hope that the chatter will tar their opponents as loony leftists who care nothing for national security. "This is such a gift," said Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio chat show host.

For demoralised conservatives, the issue is a call to arms for the mid-term congressional elections. "Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House right now," Paul Weyrich, a top conservative organiser, warned in an e-mail newsletter to supporters.

"With impeachment on the horizon maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all," Weyrich wrote.

If few senior Democrats are calling publicly for Bush to be placed in the dock, plenty are flirting with the idea. One of them is Al Gore, the defeated 2000 presidential candidate, who is increasingly talked up as a serious anti-war contender at the next election.

Gore said recently that Bush’s "unlawful" eavesdropping was part of a larger pattern of "seeming indifference" to the American constitution, which could well be an impeachable offence.

John Kerry, the 2004 presidential nominee, was overheard in an Irish bar on Capitol Hill talking about how satisfying it would be to impeach Bush if Congress went Democrat. He was just having a laugh, his spokeswoman rushed to explain: "Impeachment jokes in Washington are as old as Donald Rumsfeld."

But then she turned serious: "How are the same Republicans, who tried to impeach a president over whether he misled a nation about an affair, going to pretend it does not matter if the administration intentionally misled the country into war?"

The urge to impeach is partly payback for the Bill Clinton era when Republicans dragged the president through the mud over his dalliance with the intern Monica Lewinksy.

Others are convinced there is a good case against Bush based on the 2002 Downing Street memo -- revealed by The Sunday Times -- in which Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, said

"the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy"

of removing Saddam Hussein. Congressman John Conyers, the senior Democrat who took part in Watergate proceedings against President Richard Nixon in 1974, has called for a committee of inquiry into the grounds for impeachment.

AfterDowningStreet.org, a web-based group, commissioned a poll last autumn showing that by 50% to 44% Americans would like Congress to consider impeaching Bush if he were found to have lied about the case for war. None of this would have much impact were it not for Bush’s dire polling figures and grave doubts about the president’s competence.

With the Senate voting last week to increase the national debt to

$9,000,000,000,000

it is not only Democrats who are wondering about Bush’s ability to govern. Republicans, anxious about losing the November mid-term elections, have been calling for a cabinet reshuffle to replace some of the tired figures in Bush’s administration. The war in Iraq is increasingly regarded as a vote loser for the party. Last week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll put the president’s approval rating at 37%.

By 50% to 28% voters said they believed that the war had weakened America’s standing in the world and by 44% to 18% they believed that it had increased the threat from Iran. By 50% to 35% they said they would vote for a congressional candidate who favoured withdrawing troops from Iraq in a year.

A compilation of state-wide polls has further bad news for Bush. In mid-America’s Republican heartlands the president is almost as unpopular as he is nationally.

In Texas, his own back yard, only 41% approve of his performance. "People in Texas like George Bush and he was a popular governor," said Wayne Slater, chief political correspondent of the Dallas Morning News. "But even his biggest supporters are losing confidence in him. They say they don’t understand what Bush is doing."

Many conservatives are wondering why Karen Hughes, Bush’s top aide from his home state in two victorious elections, is wandering around the Middle East as a goodwill diplomat on a futile mission to persuade Muslims that America has got their best interests at heart, when she is needed to bolster the president at home.

The only person more unpopular than Bush right now is Dick Cheney, the vice-president, who bottomed out at 18% in a recent poll. Bush joked at a Washington dinner last week: "When Dick first heard that my approval rating was 38% he said, "What’s your secret?’"

Some seasoned Democrat counsellors are warning party activists that voters are rarely interested in vengeful politics. In the 1998 mid-term elections, for example, the Republicans’ often mean-spirited efforts to impeach Clinton cost them seats that they had been expected to win.

Joe Lockhart, Clinton’s White House spokesman during the Lewinsky scandal, said: "If you are looking for a message to take back to the House and the Senate or White House, there are better ways to go about it."

After the humiliating experience of her husband’s battle, Hillary Clinton almost certainly feels the same way. The most telling sign of the Democrats’ determination to get Bush is that she would rather hide than say it.

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.