Incompetence, Impeachment, Fiscal Responsibility

Just go read Digby's Hullabaloo... every day. Here are three great posts back-to-back-to-back.

While coming down on the evil side in the "Is BushCo more evil than incompetent" debate, I think that BushCo is incompetent but not just in the conventional sense about poor execution but especially in the coming up with dreadful ideas sense. I take the point made here but the incompetence label being used to let those who came up with the ideas off the hook.

About incompetence, Digby says:

Using that term to describe the Bush administration at all allows the "Bush is not a conservative" babblers to set forth the rationale that it was just an inability to carry out (presumably good) conservative policies that has led to such a catastrophic failure, when the truth is that the most efficient people in the world could not have made these policies successful.

Poputonian points us to David Swanson making the case for impeachment.

We must pursue impeachment of Cheney and Bush, not because of any animosity toward those individuals, and certainly not for electoral advantage. Rather, we must impeach because if we do not, we will be rewriting the rules for all future administrations. The greatest concern of those who put impeachment in the Constitution was that an executive could needlessly take the nation into war. We now face a case in which the President and Vice President began a war in secret with misappropriated funds, intentionally misled the Congress and the public about the need for war, launched a war that is patently illegal under the U.N. charter and U.S. law, began the construction of permanent military bases in a foreign nation with no consultation with Congress and continued that construction after Congress forbade it. Through the course of this war, which US intelligence and international studies conclude has made the world far more dangerous and the United States far less popular, and which has put our great grandchildren into financial debt, the Bush Administration has sanctioned illegal spying, kidnapping, extraordinary rendition, detentions without charge, torture, murder, the use of illegal weapons, and the illegal targeting of civilians, hospitals, and journalists. Numerous attempts by Congress to temper these policies have been unconstitutionally reversed by presidential signing statements.

[...]

If we do not impeach, we can expect the same behavior Bush and Cheney have engaged in, and worse, from future administrations.

The President has made clear that he will not end the war or place himself under the rule of law. The Congress has made clear that it will not seriously attempt to end the war or to investigate the fraud that initiated it. The people of the United States and of the world are looking to state governments like yours for heroic leadership. And there can be no doubt that history, should our species weather the current storms, will look back on your actions as heroic if you successfully initiate the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Congress will not act without you. You are the people's last recourse. If you let them down, democracy lets them down.

Please do not be like the neighbors who watch a murder out the window and all assume that someone else is phoning for help. Everyone else is failing. We are looking to you for leadership.

Please heed the warning of Congressman Abraham Lincoln, who heroically challenged President Polk's fraudulent and aggressive war on Mexico:

"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you 'be silent; I see it, if you don't.' The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."

Digby rips into 60 Minutes' coverage of Republican profligacy:

I am getting so tired of Republicans screwing things up so that the Democrats have to come in and clean up their messes. Tonight, I watched what could have been a vintage 1992 60 Minutes story about how the deficit is going to bankrupt the country unless somebody does something right now --- which immediately translates into a story that insists we must radically scale back all spending and entitlement programs (except the military, of course) because it would be immoral to pass these bills on to our grandchildren.

And yet, in this vintage deficit fear mongering story, there is virtually no discussion of why we are in this situation.

[...]

Excuse me, but where were he and 60 Minutes during the past six years when the Republicans blew a record surplus and dug us into a hole so deep he now says the republic is in danger?

Damn these people. Every single time these crooked Republicans get in power they line their pockets with taxpayer funded boondoggles and tax cuts for their rich supporters then start rending their garments over the looming fiscal catastrophe they created and demand the government stop spending on all those parasitic old people and children (whose "failure of citizenship" apparently dwarfs that of the corrupt thieves who stole the nation blind and threw buckets of money down the toilet in expensive failures like Iraq.) Oh, and raising taxes is completely unacceptable.

Republicans have proven once again that they are out of control children who completely trash the country's fiscal integrity whenever they get a chance, requiring the Democrats to come in and do the painful things that are required to fix them. And every step of the way, they Republicans dog them with absurd "tax and spend" rhetoric.

It's a great racket for the GOP but it's long past time the nation put a stop to this insanity. It would be helpful if 60 Minutes at least put some of that in perspective when they get on the "responsibility" train and explain to the American people why this is. "Those days are gone" is not adequate.

From AmericaBlog:

What a great idea it was to send the US debt to China and hand out tax cuts so everyone could just pretend as though war is easy, cheap and pain free. Heck, sacrifice during war time is so last century, until it all comes crumbling down, at least.