1 Boring Old Man

Why Bush hasn’t been impeached
^{Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves}

But there’s a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off — and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush’s warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America’s support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It’s a national myth. It’s John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness — come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we’re not ready to do that.

The truth is that Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors, far from being too small, are too great. What has saved Bush is the fact that his lies were, literally, a matter of life and death. They were about war. And they were sanctified by 9/11. Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day. Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves. This doesn’t mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we’re too confused — not least by our own complicity — to work up the cold, final anger we’d need to go through impeachment. We haven’t done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our abusive spouse. We need therapy — not to save this disastrous marriage, but to end it.

I think that’s partially right. We wanted to have an enemy we could go after. There’s more. I think it’s hard for us to get our collective minds around how corrupt this Administration really is. It’s almost too painful to admit that it’s our turn to be the aggressors, the bad guys, the greedy ones, the crooks. And those things only scratch the surface. We’re the ones that have become the torturers. We’ve undermined the Geneva Conventions. We’re the ones who deny prisoners their day in court. We’re the ones with the big dangerous bombs. We’re the ones that have turned the atmosphere against the planet. We’re the ones with a Justice Department that’s a political arm of Party. We’re the ones that has a Congress that can’t hear the will of the people. We’re the ones that started a senseless war that’s killed untold civilians.

We don’t impeach Bush because to do so is to admit how far we’ve plunged. Well, it’s time for us to find a way to look deeply into that mirror…