The World Can't Wait
by Wanda Sabir

I wasn't at the July 23 meeting between Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., Cindy Sheehan, and Ray McGovern, where Rep. John Conyers was asked to consider impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Yet I am disappointed that as chair of U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, who Yearwood said “is the person who can begin the process or keep is from happening,” Conyers did not agree with this proposal supported by 1 million signatures, among them mine.

Perhaps because I live in California where a governor was recalled, I am not opposed to pulling out the crooknecked cane and snatching from thrones any politician who forgets the tenets of democracy which means "people power." (This is not to say that I am pleased with Schwarzenegger or that I was displeased with the former governor, Gray Davis. The point is, there was a petition and something happened.)

After two terms, I would think George W. Bush has tried the patience of sainted legislators, perhaps this isn't true, if some are willing to wait his term out. I can't even conceive the damage. One might say, okay, he's impeached then there's Cheney and Rice...the list is not endless but it does go on and on. Impeach them all or thrown them in prison for their crimes, especially Cheney and the rest of the cabinet. Yearwood said “Rep. Conyers is the recognized authority on Capitol Hill both on impeachment and on the impeachable offenses of Vice President Cheney and President Bush. He and his staff literally wrote the book on them before the Democrats won the majority last November: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/constitutionincrisis.”

Obviously, Yearwood and company thought, incorrectly that Conyers was an ally.
I can imagine the disappointment 400 activists waiting in the hall outside Conyers’ office felt when Yearwood, Sheehan, and McGovern stepped into the hallway and told them Conyers disagreed with their strategy and refused to participate. Conyers is key to the impeachment process, but I presume there are other avenues –what those are, have not been articulated.

One doesn’t necessarily get rid of someone just because their answer is no. Conyers is a free agent. However, if the mood of the country and the majority of its constituents is desperation over current leadership and these are the people you have sworn to represent and serve, then why are you refusing to support their request?

Okay, so Conyers stated there was not enough evidence to support a demand to impeach the president and vice president. I don’t know, the Downing Street document looks pretty comprehensive. Perhaps Conyers wants to spare this country and his constituents time and money on an issue which would not pass if brought to trial? If such is the case, then our constitution is a weak document that needs amending. Since when is starting a war based on lies legal? Since when is stealing an election, not once, but twice, legal? Since when is pardoning known criminals legal?

It seems to me that Bush has done so much wrong that his actions could not stand up to legal scrutiny, if Clinton was being impeached for lying under oath--what's the difference here? Isn't a lie a lie? Clinton's lies weren't attached to such decisions that have cost America dearly in nonrenewable resources—human life.

This administration has cheapened and eroded irreplaceable values, ones that made this country great, values such as tolerance of differences among its population, values like individual freedom to exercise one's displeasure in the ballot box and on the street corner. Now one can be thrown in prison where among the losses, post-Bush, is a right to due process and to a speedy trial.

One cannot even wear a dissenting tee-shirt anymore, and the news media is owned by the government or its corporate sponsors--democracy brought to you care of Bechtel, Halliburton, Clear Channel, or Disney.

Everything else is moving towards privatization—the airwaves, publishing houses, schools, prisons, the medical industry, gone are the family farms, why not a privatized government?

Elections are stolen, ballots destroyed, patriotism trampled along with it a spirit and a drive that once made me proud to be an American. I have to reach back and grab an ancestor's hand to know why I want to still participate in this farce called the democratic process. Why would anyone register to vote in this country if they watched the process unfold over the last two presidential elections without consequence?

This is why the impeachment process is being pushed. What else do we have as a democracy except revolutionary warfare to address this evil that is being spread throughout the land like a balm dulling senses and stifling resistance?

The emperor has gotten so comfortable he thinks he can do anything he likes and we cannot do anything to stop him. Damn, sounds like a dictatorship. New Orleans after Katrina was under marshal law, curfew instituted with shoot to kill orders in place for any black moving targets. Many people were killed by these guns for hire--Black Water vigilantes.

No one calls for revolution, it's an inconvenience most Americans are not interested in contemplating. This flawed system is slow and costly. It takes generations for things to happen; nothing is immediate and the laws in place just make it easier to keep the inequities stabilized and multiplying like an infectious bacteria.

I can see why so many Africans in the Diaspora are leaving this country and headed to Africa, yet even Africa has been bitten by this disease nicknamed Western culture. Funny on the 200th anniversary of the end of the slave trade in Britain, Americans are losing their freedoms secured by the blood of Africans even when black people weren't seen worthy to be called human, even when these rights were not extended to them, and when they were, quickly legislated away during a period called Reconstruction and Jim Crow and Segregation and now one called by the titles "Patriot Act" and "No Child Left Behind" and “Mandatory Sentencing Laws,” our tax dollars split between the military and prison industrial complexes.

One cannot sensibly contemplate taking up arms in a nation where arms stockpiling is first to none, but if one cannot remove leadership which is threatening to the well-being of not just Americans, but the rest of the world, what can one do?

Waiting is not an option. I'm sure Rep. Conyers knows this as our president contemplates a war in Iran and a way to put off the election by throwing this country into some sort of turmoil so the 2008 elections can be suspended. Remember 9/11.

Visit http://www.worldcantwait.org/ and for Yearwood’s piece see: "Race is the Tripwire for the Progressive Movement: John Conyers and Impeachment CommonDreams.org"http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/26/2794/