Cheney on the Defensive

Cheney on the Defensive

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Dick Cheney has been a destructive force on the checks and balances of American government for more than six years. He has subverted long-standing processes, procedures, protocols and laws to lead us into the tragedy in Iraq, and is now seeking to do the same with Iran. (Both countries, mind you, that he did business with while CEO of Halliburton.)

As the Washington Post‘s recent four-part series on the most influential and powerful man ever to hold the office of vice president showed, Cheney has usurped his Cabinet colleagues to make himself the dominant voice on tax and spending policy; secretly steered the Bush administration’s most important environmental decisions and purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive Congress by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

That’s why there’s a growing national movement to support H. Res 333, the articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney. The bill is already endorsed by 14 members of Congress–Yvette Clarke, William Lacy, Keith Ellison, Bob Filner, Jesse Jackson Jr., Hank Johnson, Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, Jim Moran, Jan Schakowsky, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey and Albert Wynn.

In the blogosphere, as Ari Melber recently reported in The Notion, leading bloggers like those at Daily Kos have launched a targeted campaign to specifically lobby Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee to put impeachment back on the table. And earlier this week, MoveOn.org launched an unprecedented petition calling on Congress to impeach Cheney if he defies congressional subpoenas issued to investigate the Bush administration’s purge of prosecutors at the Justice Department.

You can sign the petition calling for the bill’s passage here; watch a new video (below) by Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films for the case for why Cheney deserves immediate impeachment; check out impeachcheney.org for info on the impeachment campaign and read John Nichols’s book, The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History (The New Press), for the back-story of a vindictive, inflexible ideologue who gained tremendous power in the current administration.

We cannot back down

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Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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