“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena। Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
* This is a picture of Earth. Yes. If you look very carefully and closely, you’d see it. Just below the center line, on the right side, bathed in sunbeam. Yes, it’s that speck of dust.
The latest Bush administration scandal—the firing of eight U.S. attorneys under highly questionable circumstances—has Washington abuzz with talk of a new Watergate. The question on everyone’s mind is: Could this be the president’s Saturday night massacre—the obstruction of justice that triggers impeachment?
Unless there is a sea change in Congress, talk of impeachment is largely a hypothetical exercise. That does not mean there’s no legal case against the president. If a California prosecutor were fired to end an investigation of a Republican congressman, that might be a crime. If the others were fired for failing to prosecute Democrats without evidence, that would be a gross abuse of power. If President George W. Bush played any role, impeachment is a legal possibility.
We need not wait for the outcome of investigations of this scandal, however, to conclude that President Bush has so abused the powers of his office that he could be impeached and removed from office. There are already other substantial grounds.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew that despite powerful checks, presidents might still abuse their powers and damage the country’s democracy, so they created impeachment as the ultimate safeguard. Constitutional grounds for impeachment are “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” During Nixon’s impeachment, the House Judiciary Committee determined that abuses did not have to violate the criminal code to meet this test. They simply needed to be, as the framers said in constitutional debates, “great and dangerous offenses that subvert the Constitution.” Several of the president’s actions already qualify.
The strongest legal argument for impeachment—because it is based on the Watergate precedent—arises out of the fact that President Bush refused for years to seek court approval required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for a special wiretapping program in the United States. After revelations that President Nixon illegally wiretapped journalists and White House staffers, Congress enacted FISA to prevent future such abuses, making them a federal crime. Illegal wiretapping was one of the grounds for articles of impeachment against Nixon.
But 30 years later, President Bush asserted that FISA hampered intelligence gathering in the war on terror, so as commander in chief he could ignore it. Actually, the FISA court overwhelmingly grants presidential requests (19,000 approvals since 1978 versus 5 rejections) and can grant approvals after wiretaps commence. But if President Bush still thought FISA too burdensome, he should have asked Congress to amend it. Since he didn’t, he must obey it. After the 2006 elections, he reversed himself, announcing he would comply with FISA, but what about all the years he flouted it?
The Constitution plainly states the president shall “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The president must obey and uphold the law, not take it into his own hands. Case law on this is clear. When during the Korean War President Truman wanted to seize U.S. steel mills to keep them running despite a strike, the Supreme Court said no, noting in its decision that the president was commander in chief of the Army and Navy, not the country.
But the truth is, impeaching a president is not just about checking off legal boxes. There must be solid evidence of wrongdoing, but impeachment is an inherently political act. The legal case must resonate with the public, not just lawyers.
That’s why the strongest political ground for impeachment isn’t Bush’s illegal wiretapping program, but the fact that the country was driven into war in Iraq—which most Americans now view as a disastrous mistake—under false pretenses. The framers deliberately gave Congress war-making powers because the momentous decision to go to war should be reached only after the fullest consideration. They believed Congress would curb the historical tendency of executives to make war needlessly. If a president lies or deceives Congress about going to war, he negates its critical constitutional role.
President Bush and his team falsely implied that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in cahoots, reiterating this suggestion so often that by the time of the invasion, most Americans thought Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and U.S. soldiers saw their deployment in Baghdad as “payback.” Yet shortly after 9/11 occurred, former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke told the president that Saddam had nothing to do with it. President Bush undoubtedly also knew that U.S. intelligence agencies gave little credence to the possibility that Saddam Hussein would provide weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda.
Moreover, the president either lied or was aware that something was seriously wrong when he told Congress in his 2003 State of the Union address that the British government discovered that Saddam tried to buy uranium in Africa, supposedly proof that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons capacity. But U.S. intelligence knew that claim was bogus at the time, and months after the invasion, the president acknowledged this.
If the president had been briefed on U.S. intelligence before his address, then he deliberately deceived Congress and the United States about the war, “a great and dangerous offense that subverts the Constitution.” In the unlikely event he was not briefed, he still took us to war based on British intelligence, without consulting U.S. intelligence, violating his responsibility to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed.” A full investigation would determine to what extent he and Vice President Dick Cheney deliberately deceived Congress and Americans about the war.
Facilitating mistreatment of detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and U.S. statutes (including the War Crimes Act of 1996) is another ground for impeachment. President Bush’s directive effectively removed these protections from al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. After abuses at Abu Ghraib became public, President Bush failed to conduct thorough investigations or to ensure those responsible, including higher-ups, were brought to justice, further violating the Geneva Conventions and his constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the law.
Other potential grounds for impeachment exist, but in my judgment the pattern of this president’s failure to uphold the law and his subversion of the Constitution is sufficiently clear. The question now is, what to do about it?
Nine years ago, my friend, aWe were singing. Our some-
what hormone tinged chords,
distorted by the gust of air.
Half the word would shiver.
Our lips wobbly like rubber.
Woolf had been discovered,
shelved. You asked me what
I wanted. Money. Love. Thin-ness.
I replied. Years later, your glasses
come to memory. You liked to
stand with the wind hitting
your face, only with naked eyes.
I wish now, that I had taken cue.
From that author. Asked for
something unsharable. Like
a room। Or emptiness.
Published by Neha Viswanatha
In classical science, humans place all things in time and space on a continuum. The universe is 15 to 20 billion years old; the earth five or six. Homo erectus appeared four million years ago, but he took three-and-a-half million years to discover fire, and another 490,000 to invent agriculture. And so forth. Time in a mechanistic universe (as described by Newton and Einstein and Darwin) is an arrow upon which events are notched. But imagine, instead, that reality is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the record itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music before and after the song you are hearing is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, that every moment and day endures in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. If we could access all life—the whole record—we could experience it non-sequentially. We could know our children as toddlers, as teenagers, as senior citizens—all now. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now [Besso—one of his oldest friends] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us . . . know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” That there is an irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events linked to galaxies and suns and the earth is a fantasy.
