The Impeachment's Moral Hypocrisy
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The impeachment process was a nauseating display of mortal hypocrisy. The
sound bites by Republicans and Democrats swiftly became predictable. The
Democrats, despite applauding the announcement of the voting results before
being quickly silenced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sought to cloak
themselves in gravitas and solemnity. Pelosi's calculated decision to open
the impeachment proceedings with the 1954 "under God" version of the Pledge
of Allegiance was an appropriate signal given the party's New McCarthyism.
The Democrats posited themselves as saviors, the last line of defense
between a constitutional democracy and tyranny. The Republicans, as
cloyingly sanctimonious as the Democrats, offered up ludicrous analogies to
attack what they condemned as a show trial, including Rep. Barry
Loudermilk's statement that "Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus
than the Democrats have afforded to this president." The Republicans
shamelessly prostrated themselves throughout the 10-hour process at the feet
of their cult leader Donald Trump, offering abject and eternal fealty. They
angrily accused the Democrats of seeking to overturn the 2016 election in a
legislative coup.
It was a mind-numbing spectacle, devoid of morality and ethics, the kind of
political theater that characterizes despotic regimes. No one in the House
chamber was protecting the Constitution. No one was seeking to hold
accountable those who had violated it. No one was fighting to restore the
rule of law. The two parties, which have shredded constitutional protections
and rights and sold the political process to the highest bidders, have
engaged in egregious constitutional violations for years and ignored them
when they were made public. Moral stances have a cost, but almost no one in
Congress seems willing to pay. Trying to tar Trump as a Russian agent
failed. Now the Democrats hope to discredit him with charges of abuse of
power and contempt of Congress.
The politicization of the impeachment process has only exacerbated the
antagonisms and polarization in the country. It has, ironically, increased
support for Trump, who in this toxic environment may well be reelected. His
approval rating has jumped to 45 percent, up from 39 percent when the
impeachment inquiry was launched, according to the latest Gallup survey,
conducted from Dec. 2 to Dec. 15. This is the third consecutive increase in
Trump's approval rating. Among Republicans, Trump has a job approval rating
of 89%, almost nine in 10 in the GOP. Fifty-one percent of Americans oppose
impeachment and removal, up five percentage points since the House inquiry
began, Gallup reports.
Yes, Trump's contempt of Congress and attempt to get Volodymyr Zelensky, the
Ukrainian president, to open an investigation of Joe Biden and his son,
Hunter, in exchange for almost $400 million in U.S. military aid and
allowing Zelensky to visit the White House are impeachable offenses, but
trivial and minor ones compared with the constitutional violations that the
two parties have institutionalized and, I fear, made permanent. These
sustained, bipartisan constitutional violations-not Trump-resulted in the
failure of our democracy. Trump is the pus coming out of the wound.
If the Democrats and the Republicans were committed to defending the
Constitution why didn't they impeach George W. Bush when he launched two
illegal wars that were never declared by Congress as demanded by the
Constitution? Why didn't they impeach Bush when he authorized placing the
entire U.S. public under government surveillance in direct violation of the
Fourth Amendment? Why didn't they impeach Bush when he authorized torture
along with kidnapping terrorist suspects around the world and holding them
for years in our black sites and offshore penal colonies? Why didn't they
impeach Barack Obama when he expanded these illegal wars to 11, if we count
Yemen? Why didn't they impeach Obama when Edward Snowden revealed that our
intelligence agencies are monitoring and spying on almost every citizen and
downloading our data and metrics into government computers where they will
be stored for perpetuity? Why didn't they impeach Obama when he misused the
2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force to erase due process and give
the executive branch of government the right to act as judge, jury and
executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with the radical cleric
Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son? Why didn't they
impeach Obama when he signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense
Authorization Act, in effect overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which
prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force?
There are other bipartisan constitutional violations, including violating
treaty clauses that are supposed to be ratified by the Senate, violating the
Constitution by making appointments without seeking Senate confirmation, and
the routine abusive use of executive orders. But the two major political
parties, salivating at the thought of wielding the king-like power that now
comes with the presidency, have no desire to curb these far more dangerous
violations.
The selective use of the two violations to impeach Trump is a weaponization
of the impeachment process. Should the Democrats take control of the White
House and the Republicans control of the Congress, impeachment, with or
without merit, will become another form of political pressure exerted within
our dysfunctional and divided political system. The rule of law will be a
pretense, as in the current process of impeachment and Senate trial.
The impeachment circus, which will culminate in a preordained, choreographed
and televised show in the Senate, coincided with The Washington Post's
release of what is being called the Afghanistan Papers. The Post, through a
three-year legal battle, obtained more than 2,000 pages of internal
government documents about the war. The papers detail bipartisan lies,
fraud, deceit, corruption, waste and gross mismanagement during the 18-year
conflict, the longest in U.S. history. It is a blistering indictment of the
ruling class, which, as the papers note, since 2001 has seen the Defense
Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development
spend or win appropriation of between $934 billion and $978 billion,
according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a
political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at
Brown University. "These figures," the Post adds, "do not include money
spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans
Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans." [See
Chris Hedges discuss the Afghanistan Papers with Spenser Rapone, a West
Point graduate who served as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan.]
This window into the inner workings of our bankrupt ruling elite,
responsible for widespread destruction and the loss of tens, perhaps
hundreds, of thousands of lives in Afghanistan, was largely ignored by the
media during the impeachment proceedings. Neither political party, and none
of their courtiers on the cable news shows, is interested in exposing the
bipartisan failure, lying and grotesque incompetence on the part of the
United States in the years it has occupied Afghanistan. Afghan and U.S.
officials concede that the Taliban is stronger now than at any other time
since the 2001 invasion.
In a functioning democracy, the publication of the Afghanistan Papers would
see generals and politicians who knowingly deceived the public hauled before
congressional committees. The Fulbright hearings, during the Vietnam War,
although they did not lead to prosecutions, at least aggressively held U.S.
officials to account and made public their duplicity and failure. But in the
wake of the new disclosures, no one in either political party or the
military will be held accountable for the debacle in Afghanistan, a conflict
that saw a vast waste of resources, including nearly a trillion dollars that
could have been used to address our pronounced social inequality, rebuild
our decaying infrastructure and help end our reliance on fossil fuels.
The Afghanistan Papers lay bare a truth the hyperventilating Republican and
Democratic mandarins in Congress prefer to mask. On all the major structural
issues-war, the economy, the use of militarized police and the world's
largest prison system for social control, the infusion of corporate money to
deform the electoral and legislative processes, slashing taxes for the
wealthy and corporations, exploitative trade deals, austerity, the climate
emergency and the rapidly accelerating government debt-there is little or no
difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.
The political clashes are not substantive, despite what we heard in the
impeachment hearings. They are rhetorical and largely inconsequential. The
Republicans and the Democrats recently passed a $738 billion defense bill
for fiscal year 2020, a $21 billion increase over what was enacted for
fiscal year 2019. The vote was a lopsided 377 to 48. The U.S. spends more on
its military than the next 10 countries combined. Also, a day after the
impeachment of President Trump, the Republicans and Democrats in the House
passed a thinly veiled rewrite of the Clinton administration's North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the 25-year-old free trade agreement
that hollowed out our manufacturing centers and sent U.S. jobs and
production to Mexico. Again, the vote was lopsided, 385 to 41. When the
wealthy and our corporate masters want something done, it gets done. Our
elected officials serve them, not us. We are to be controlled.
The Republican and Democratic politicians, like the generals, government
bureaucrats and intelligence chiefs, once they leave their government posts
will be generously rewarded by being given jobs as lobbyists and consultants
or being appointed to corporate boards. These politicians are the mutant
products of our system of legalized bribery, shameless kleptocrats. The only
interests they serve are their own. This truth binds half the country to
Trump, who although a con artist and himself flagrantly corrupt, at least
belittles and mocks the ruling elites who have betrayed us.
Trump and his supporters are not wrong in condemning the deep state-the
generals, bankers, corporatists, lobbyists, intelligence chiefs, government
bureaucrats and technocrats who oversee domestic and international policy no
matter who is in power. The Afghanistan Papers, while detailing the quagmire
in Afghanistan-where more than 775,000 Americans were deployed over the 18
years, more than 2,300 soldiers and Marines killed and more than 20,000
wounded-also illustrate how seamlessly the two ruling parties and the deep
state work together.
"What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?"
Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and
Obama, is quoted as saying by The Washington Post. "After the killing of
Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave
considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan."
The Post writes, "The documents also contradict a long chorus of public
statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who
assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in
Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. Several of those interviewed
described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to
deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military
headquarters in Kabul-and at the White House-to distort statistics to make
it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case."
"As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the
same thing," the Post notes. "They would avoid falling into the trap of
'nation-building' in Afghanistan. On that score, the presidents failed
miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build
up Afghanistan-more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the
whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II."
There is no difference, the Afghanistan Papers make clear, in the mendacity
and incompetence of the policymaking apparatus no matter who controls
Congress or the White House. No party or elected official dares defy the
military-industrial complex or other titans of the deep state. The Democrats
through impeachment have no intention of restoring constitutional rights
that would curb the power of the deep state and protect democracy. The deep
state funds them. It sustains them in office. The Democrats are seeking to
replace the inept and vulgar face of empire that is Trump with the benign
and decorous face of empire that is Joe Biden. What the Democrats, and the
deep state that has allied itself with the Democratic Party, object to is
the mask, not what is behind it. If you doubt me, read the six-part series
on Afghanistan in the Post.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
Chris Hedges
