Republicans we should listen to

On the Thom Hartmann show this morning one of the guests was Republican Paul Craig Roberts. Dr Roberts has been trying to warn us about the tyrannical nature of the Bush Cheney cabal for several years and really had his tinfoil hat on this morning. He is convinced that Cheney will "stage" a terrorist attack before the November elections in an attempt to avoid a massive Republican defeat. He agrees with Hartmann's guest the day before, Bruce Fein, a the Republican that authored the Clinton articles of impeachment. Mr Fein repeated some of what he said his Slate article a few weeks ago.
Impeach Cheney
The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.

Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.

While the Democratic leadership continues to fear that impeachment hearings would bring on a "Constitutional Crisis" Mr Fein believes, as do many of us, that we are in a constitutional crisis that can only be ended by impeachment. Mr Fein concludes with this:

Yet without making a written transmittal to Congress, President Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice President Cheney by mutual understanding that circumvents the 25th Amendment. This constitutional provision assures that the public and Congress know who is exercising the powers of the presidency and who should be held responsible for successes or failures. The Bush-Cheney dispensation blurs political accountability by continually hiding the real decision-maker under presidential skirts. The Washington Post has thoroughly documented the vice president's dominance in a four-part series running this week. It is quite a read.

In the end, President Bush regularly is unable to explain or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law.

On Hartmann's show this morning Dr Roberts made it clear that he believes that Dick Cheney is capable of anything to consolidate and keep his own power and push his own agenda. That includes attacking his own country. For that reason Dr Roberts agrees with Fein that Cheney must be impeached at once.

The Lord of Darkness has few friends

I have no doubt that the evil insanity of Dick Cheney frightens many Republicans as much as it frightens we Democrats and Independents. I would guess there are at least a few Republicans who wouldn't shed a tear if Cheney were to not survive his next medical event. When the mouthpiece for the Republican elites, Sally Quinn, suggested that there was A GOP Plan To Oust Cheney all I could do was mock it and I was joined by most on both the right and the left. But deep down inside I was wondering who put her up to it.

Then this morning a man with unquestionable Conservative Republican credentials, Bruce Fein, called for Dick Cheney's impeachment. Mr Fein even supplied a list of Mr Cheney's "high crimes">

• The vice president asserted presidential power to create military commissions, which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes.
• The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists.
• The vice president has maintained that the entire world is a battlefield. Accordingly, he contends that military power may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on American soil if suspected of association or affiliation with al-Qaida.
• Mr. Cheney has championed a presidential power to torture in contravention of federal statutes and treaties.
• He has advocated and authored signing statements that declare the president's intent to disregard provisions of bills he has signed into law that he proclaims are unconstitutional.
• The vice president engineered the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program targeting American citizens on American soil in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
• The vice president has orchestrated the invocation of executive privilege to conceal from Congress secret spying programs to gather foreign intelligence, and their legal justifications.
• Cheney scorns freedom of speech and of the press. He urges application of the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists who expose national security abuses, for example, secret prisons in Eastern Europe or the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. He retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, through Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, for questioning the administration's evidence of weapons of mass destruction as justification for invading Iraq.

Do these events less than two days apart indicate a real movement to get rid of Dick Cheney? I don't know but I think it's something we should watch in the next few days or even weeks.