STORMGLASS

"We know the state of the union, it's a lie". Truth has seldom been spoken in such simple terms. With these words Kucinich dismissed any need to postpone his move to impeach Bush until after the state of the union speech. The time has come for action and only one candidate is strong enough and of sound minded enough to step up the plate. (Pardon the baseball analogy but it had to be.)

This is what it has all been leading up to. This is what people will remember about this election years from now, not some speech Obama gave in Iowa. Not that the media and establishment won't do everything in their power to down play and ridicule or even ignore Kucinich's bold move now that he has already submitted articles of impeachment toward Cheney and gotten twenty four congress members to sign on. No matter what the main stream reaction is the articles will still have been introduced and it will in a way represent the moment when all of America somehow, deep down, starts to recognize that the dream is dead. The dream of America somehow being so great that we deserve to be the richest and most powerful people on the planet indefinitely - even if by force. That's the thing that Democrats and Republicans have been agreeing upon since World War II - particularly the Bush's and the Clintons - and the people believed it. It took the current administration's stunning level of corruption and lying to shake that belief but it has also taken a supremely qualified candidate such as Kucinich to drive the point home.

The gauntlet has been thrown and history will record that Dennis Kucinich introduced articles of impeachment against George W. Bush on the same day as the state of the union address. To Nancy Pelosi and her singular commitment to keeping impeachment off the table Kucinich has said "if impeachment is off the table than truth is off the table". A second gauntlet. Perhaps the all powerful one party machine should have thought twice about leaving a man like that out of the debates. Turns out they were damned either way - the truth is coming out. Perhaps the corporate controlled democratic candidates should be focusing more on the bigger picture rather than getting caught up in their theater of absurd squabble.

Kucinich's move, no matter how the "Sabotage press" (as Harry Truman used to call it) tries to spin it, will come back to haunt every candidate running for office at the current moment. The reason is because Kucinich has the law on his side. By the time the election rolls around the scandals will be exploding so fast and furious that the shock of revelation will stoke public outrage over the fact that nothing was done sooner. Before long even republicans will be calling for impeachment because they know that after the election, if Bush is not impeached, everyone will be admitting that he should have been. Then you will have an entire government full of people forced to explain why they didn't do their jobs.

When it comes to high crimes in the oval office congress members are law enforcement officials and they are all currently (all but twenty four that is) derelict in their duties. All the people whose job it was to push impeachment forward will have to explain to investigative committees why they refused so adamantly to do so. These committees will be forced into existence because without gestapo style homeland security curtailing freedom of speech and right to protest peacefully you will have a lot more public displays of outrage. You might even have the alternative press gaining in stature and market reach and suddenly the media monopoly is over and then of course the truth tends to spread around fast and furious in such a climates.

Then you have a change in who gets elected and with that you have hearings on the great big disaster that corporate corruption and clandestine military complex operations have inflicted upon our democracy for many decades. As all of this spills into public view the big question will be why didn't anybody in government break the silence and then people will remember.  Oh yeah that guy that everybody dismissed. That guy with the hard to pronounce last name who seemed really cool but everybody called unelectable.

By that time Kucinich will be everywhere. He will be the guy who stood up for the rule of law at the moment when Bush was preparing to pass his torch of tyranny to one of the other shills. Kucinich will be the guy who everyone recognizes as having had more guts and hope than anyone in politics for simply saying what needed to be said and doing what needed to be done. All of this is bound to happen because if you look closely enough you can see that the arguments against impeachment are all completely unethical and unable to stand the test of time.

I've read many  accounts of representatives trying to explain to their constituents that even though the vast majority favor impeachment they are still not going to sign Kucinich's bill. They all seem to read from the same script. I even attended a sit in where over a hundred people forced our local representative, who is supposedly extremely outspoken and progressive, into a meeting where he read from the same script. He scolded all of us simply because we insisted on a straight answer as if we were little children who just didn't understand how Washington works. We understand all to well. The big argument he gave was the same one they are all giving and it is an argument which is based completely on democratic party strategy.

Now correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think that is how our system is supposed to work. Putting partisan politics ahead of the law seems in and of itself grounds for impeachment. Didn't tricky dick learn that the hard way. I even read an article where the author had dined with Rep. Conyers and was given the same spiel. Conyers made the two strategy points that so many in the house have made to their angry constituents. First that it might cost the democrats the white house. Second that there just aren't enough votes.

Now, I'm no law enforcement expert but when arresting someone, as far as I know, you see how much evidence there is, you don't try to figure out who the jury will be and how they might vote at the end of the trial. Everyone knows that juries swing in different directions and that there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY OF KNOWING (unless it is rigged which is what congress might be trying to tell us) which way a jury will swing once all of the evidence is presented. And you certainly don't base your decision on arresting a criminal upon the outcome of an upcoming election, that would be corruption of the highest order. Yet here is Mr. Impeachment expert himself, chair of the Judiciary committee coming out and exposing himself as one of the nations leaders basing the biggest decision of his career on the outcome of a future election and the chance that such an initiative might fail. That's like the FBI saying well, Al Capone is really powerful and can sway elections so I don't think we should try to arrest him. If they took that approach then Capone would have become president and beaten George to the punch.

No matter what the outcome for our political future we owe it to our system to keep the integrity alive. We must start to enforce law fairly otherwise the result, which we already see unfolding on the battlefield and on wall street, is complete lawlessness. The way to restore the law is to enforce it, even if at first you don't succeed. For if the Democrats put politics ahead of simply doing their jobs of enforcing the law than even if they get themselves elected nobody will trust them to do anything other than what Bush has been doing all along, using the law to bolster the his party and the corporate elite.

Democrats have just shown us that they do the exact same thing with a slightly different complexion and that is why they are not being seen as an alternative anymore. All except Kucinich. He is more than an alternative. He is the person who is going to lead the entire nation into a calm and deliberate backing away from our drift into the madness that accompanies all empires in their final years.

He is going to help the world realize that high powered financial elite move their assets from one budding empire to the next in a constant shifting of their global power. He is going to help unite people of integrity everywhere to economically shift the world away from supporting the power elites and their wars. He will teach us how to empower ourselves through earning power, spending power and investing power. He will serve a solid eight years in the white house and then most probably go on to become the first American president ever to travel into outer space. I say that just because it's the kind of thing Dennis would do. Just when you think he's done all he can do, he does some more.

In my attempts to introduce people to the candidacy of Dennis Kucinich and the host of pressing national and global issues that he represents I suddenly became aware that an acquaintance of mine, who I walked my dog with at times, was a Fox news watching republican. I never would have guessed. When I brought up politics after a good number of weeks of never stumbling upon that topic I assumed he was a democrat so I was blown over when he told me he thought the war was great and that we needed such a war to keep the cost of oil down.

I was speechless. "Then why is it going up" was all I could muster. "Well, that's only temporary" was his confident reply. After spending a lot of time discussing issues with like minded Kucinich supporters it was stunning contrast. He had tremendous confidence that he was being protected and provided for by the same people who brought us the war and that they were fighting to make his life as comfortable as possible. After regaining my composure I thought for a while about how to approach the situation.

Finally, I started painting a picture for him of a small Iraqi village where suddenly shells start exploding and American forces are breaking down doors, shooting people, arresting, raping and torturing. He denied that anything "too serious goes on" but admitted that bad things do happen in war and that's a shame. When I urged him to he even looked at it through the Iraqi's eyes and saw that the whole situation would be different if he were one of them instead of an American. He had to admit that if that were the case he would be against Bush and the war.

He then pointed out that so long as the park we were walking in was quiet and safe and so long as he had a good paying job and a roof over his head, that he would feel satisfied with the policies that provide that security be they democrat or republican. He just happened to lean toward republicans because it culturally suited him.

After all he was a city kid brought up in a house of democrats who when he moved out to the sticks wanted so badly to fit in with the locals that he changed his name to Bud and started listening to country music. Fox news is just the natural place for a redneck wannabe to wind up during his off hours. But the funny thing is, Bud is one of the nicest people I've ever met. I mean a really good guy through and through.

He even helped me fix my car a few times while a good friend who had been promising to do the same for months was a no show. Bud was the kind of guy that could disagree with everything I said about politics and yet neither of us would feel as if it mattered a damn weather there was agreement or not. He was willing to concede that I was very well informed about all kinds of things he would never have even thought of taking the time to look into but for the most part he insisted that on key issues I was the product of liberal propaganda which was made up of lies to make the president look bad. He pretty much considered all of the news media to be liberal propaganda lies except Fox news.

Even after polls started suggesting that the vast majority of americans were against the war and Bush and a slim majority favored impeachment, including a lot of republicans, Bud still had the bumper stickers and still towed the Fox party line. He did once admit that the bumper stickers started out as a way of trying to get out of tickets since he spent a lot of time driving for his job and was convinced that all cops were Bush supporters. In fact it was a company car so while he would otherwise be driving a used car, his job allowed him to drive around in a new one. This was one of the things that he held up as why he can't complain about the system.

He was a strange mix but the most interesting thing was that morally and ethically he seemed to be an outstanding person - they just didn't translate into how he would vote. He would admit that wrong doing, and lies and corruption was bad but would shrug his shoulders about it all the way a lot of liberals do and just chalk it up to necessary evil. Finally, in desperation, I pulled out a trump card. I asked him what his religious beliefs where. "Christian", he responded, although I think more specifically he had been raised catholic.

"Oh, Christian" I said and then went on to ask what Jesus would think of torture and rape and pillaging oil and trying to take over the world not to mention small communities with wall marts and fear tactics and race baiting and all in his name no less. Well that seemed to do it, Bud got kind of quiet. He thought for a while, then smiled and thought some more. He didn't have an answer to that one. Fox news had not prepared him for that approach. The answers were spinning around in his head, I could practically hear them but he was shooting them down himself as he knew I would, albeit in a good natured teasing way. He knew there was no credible rebuttal and was actually pretty amused by it.

The words were something to the effect of "I guess you're right" but there was some shrugging and a bit of hemming and hawing about how we humans can't possibly understand the world as Jesus would see it. "True" I told him, but I can't picture the savior of saviors sending a soldier to heaven because he's a good christian who just happens to blow up babies as his day job working for a president who claims to launch wars for god. It just doesn't make sense.

The conversation was rightfully over as we politely trailed off onto another topic. Bud was calmly reflecting. He was so sure that traditional morality was the stuff that fox news was spouting and that real morality having to do with higher principals was just not very relevant to the modern world. I could see he was rethinking it a bit. He even said in parting that he would keep his ears open for Kucinich though he was just being friendly. After that the political discussions went on the back burner again and when it did come up once and a while he was still holding firmly to the republican party and Fox news.

He said it would take loosing that job and the company car before he actually started taking someone like Kucinich seriously. Like other things he is very confident about, I doubt it. I think someday he will just wake up and decide to scrape off all the old bumper stickers and turn off his television.  He will go out and take a deep breath of fresh cool air and think to himself a thought concerning how everyone deserves to live this way.

I think the same thing will happen to all of the liberals who support people like Hillary, Obama and Edwards and take all their cues from CNN and Larry King. They are just as trapped as Bud. They are even better educated than the Fox news crowd and therefore even more confident in their ignorance. The ignorance of why the New York Times is hiring neo-con hacks for it's op-ed page while refusing to print opinion pieces by Congress members trying to launch impeachment hearings. It is a willful ignorance born of not wanting to face the truth of what is happening to our democracy. Some day, hopefully soon we will all wake up and realize that it is better to aspire toward truth and be unsure of yourself than to believe lies and be confident in your ignorance.