As the impeachment process lumbers forward, we are all caught up on the latest actors, getting their fifteen minutes of infamy on the pathetic stage of government corruption. New household names become Taylor, Sondland, Yovanovitch, and Kent. May the crooks they expose get a well-deserved fifteen years.

Here’s what bothers me though. Needling the Ukrainian president for dirt on Biden? That’s the crime? That’s what should take Trump out of office? OK, I get it. Al Capone went down for tax evasion. But come on! We are not impeaching him for putting more than 2,500 children in concentration camps? That was OK, but this phone call is the high crime?

This is nothing new. Take a look back at the Nixon impeachment/resignation. That was over . .. . a break-in at the Watergate hotel. Not for genocide, killing 3 million Vietnamese people and 58,000 US soldiers? Not over the coup in Chile? Those were OK but the break-in, that was just too much.

I wonder what these two high crimes have in common. Oh, they were illegal shenanigans against the Democrats. All that other stuff is bad but play dirty against the Dems and we are shocked, shocked!

Even if we do want to focus on the issue of collusion with a foreign government, why not get to the really horrendous ones, the ones that could get the president tried for treason? How about the time in 1968 that Richard Nixon used right-wing operative Anna Chennault to induce South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to spike the peace talks long enough to get Nixon elected? This move extended the war for a bloody five more years and yet it was too hot to handle and charges were never brought against Nixon.

Then there was the foreign interference by Ronald Reagan in 1980 to delay the release of hostages in Iran, just long enough to get Reagan elected (they were released 20 minutes after Reagan concluded his inaugural address). There is plenty of evidence to support this theory, including testimony from former Iranian President Abulhassan Banisadr — but the charges never benefited from a full impeachment inquiry so the history books downgraded it to a conspiracy theory and it has faded from memory.

I worry that our voracious appetite for impeachment porn, the details of the Ukraine story, will turn us away from the crucial crisis of children in cages. When judges have ordered Homeland Security agents to connect the children with their parents and the agents failed to do so, why were they not imprisoned immediately for contempt? What is the number now? Two thousand eight hundred families? Why are private and activist organizations forced to search for families ripped from their children? Why aren’t the criminals who stole these children forced to repair the wrong? Why aren’t the top criminals, Trump and Sessions and Nielsen and McAleenan, on trial? If we are to have justice, I would say that everyone at the top but also those “only following orders” should face a reckoning. After all, even young guards at German and Polish concentration camps still face prosecution.

What has happened to our moral compass, to our sense of justice, that even caging children is normalized, alongside constant police killings of Black men and women (just this morning the news was the murder of Eric Reason in Vallejo), the desecration of Native lands, the destruction of the climate and life on earth . . . aaach, the horror! But, well, there was a funky phone call to the Ukraine.

Go ahead, get Al Capone for tax evasion. But, please, let’s be real.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 13th, 2019 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.