Screed of Momus: Obama and Libya: Where's the Impeachment?

Screed of Momus: Obama and Libya: Where's the Impeachment?

Obama and Libya: Where's the Impeachment?

 By; Jay Batman

Sunday, June 19, 2011

During the regime of George W. Bush, we watched as an organized peace movement coalesced around their unified opposition to war with Iraq. Given what we now know about the circumstances underlying our entry into Iraq, and what our government knew and ignored in order to justify its campaign to invade Iraq, the peaceniks were right. Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, the aluminum tubes it imported weren't suitable for centrifuges (and therefore not usable for enriching uranium) and the Niger memo was a mere forgery of Italian intelligence operatives who smuggled stationery out of the embassy via an elderly Italian grandmother.

With that said, we went to war in Iraq, and our actions resulted in nearly 5,000 troop deaths and anywhere from 650,000 to over 1 million Iraqi deaths. The regime we installed is notable for its corruption, and it is only held in place by the implicit guarantee of the United States. It is, for lack of any better word, a puppet.

And that is exactly what our government seeks to install throughout North Africa and the Middle East within those countries that have traditionally opposed our agenda. Syria is on its way to a full-scale implosion, and Libya is about to experience a multinational coalition's wrath on par with Desert Storm. President Obama has decided to proceed over the objection of Congress, his Attorney General Eric Holder, the Pentagon's general counsel Jeh C. Johnson, and Caroline D. Krass, acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel with his plans to continue actions against Libya.

Though the President can only commit American troops to hostile actions abroad for 90 days under the War Powers Act, our President is doing so without regard for any legal or constitutional limitation upon his office. This is not a surprise, given the President's improvisation on the fly with the TARP bailout, improvisation which saw him and his aides fashion a bailout for the automotive industry utilizing TARP funds even though the underlying legislation said nothing about the automotive industry whatsoever.

Had George W. Bush engaged in such flagrant violations, he would have likely faced impeachment and removal from his office. It is a testament to how spineless Congress has become that Barack Obama can proceed with impunity to wage war against another nation beyond the limits of federal legislation and with total disregard for the Constitution. All of this is occurring at a time when Congress is beginning to examine the Executive Branch's role in Project Gunrunner, a program of the ATF which smuggled guns over the border to the Mexican drug cartel. One of those guns was used to kill U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry, and instead of cooperating with the efforts of House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Darrell Issa, the ATF and the White House have obfuscated and stonewalled the investigation at every turn.

There are any number of reasons to want Barack Obama out of office, and they include but are not limited to the following:

• His total inability to effect any sort of economic reform or program to rejuvenate the economy, which has now slouched back into 9+% official unemployment.
• A complete failure to lead on financial reform, coupled with the watering down of virtually every meaningful bit of financial oversight reform.
• The Administration's response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster and its subsequent aiding and abetting of BP's media blackout within the Gulf of Mexico.
• The involvement of elements within the United States government in a concerted effort to destabilize regimes in North Africa in order to promote change, an ill-advised program that will likely lead to disturbances in the energy markets and the availability of oil.
• Quantitative easing and its effects on global commodities prices, which have skyrocketed abroad and led to misery for hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people.
• The failure of his Administration to address outright fraud in foreclosures of home mortgages.
• The failure of his Administration to prosecute those responsible for the fraud and malfeasance that led to the economic crisis.
• Beer Summits, Golf Summits, and other meaningless moments of executive excess at a time when one in every six Americans is on some form of federal assistance.
• Accruing deficits that in total almost equal the deficits accrued under the Bush Administration during its eight years in office. Obama has accomplished this feat in just three years.

The simple truth of Obama's time in office is that he has been an even bigger abuser of executive power than George W. Bush, and he has prolonged virtually every mistake from the Bush era. From our misguided strategy of nation-building in Afghanistan to our continued failure to address the systemic problems that led to the economic crisis, Obama has set the stage for an even bigger crisis in the future. Combined with his expansion of U.S. military involvement in Libya, and his move to set the stage for U.S. action elsewhere, President Obama's illegal and unconstitutional overreach merits a serious response from Congress.

It is not a matter of suing the President for his violation of the War Powers Act; Congress has the power to act to remove those who overreach from the Executive Branch. Congress should use that power and send a message to those who believe that this President, like the one before him, are merely building and expanding on an existing template of executive power. It is time for Barack Obama to go, and we should not wait until 2012 to remove him from office. If we spent nearly $100 million investigating Bill Clinton for lying about fellatio, and we have a man in office who has clearly violated federal laws governing the use of American military personnel in hostile actions while his subordinates have overseen the illegal trafficking of over 1,700 assault rifles over the Mexican border, we have just cause to investigate, impeach, and try Barack Obama in order to remove him from office.

Our Congress should do exactly that, and they should do it as soon as possible.