Revolution #74, December 24, 2006
Why Impeachment Should NOT Be “Off The Table”—and Why the Bush Regime Must Be Driven Out NOW
The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Sunsara Taylor at a rally on December 10 in New York at a meeting to demand impeachment.
We need to bring [people] into the streets on January 4th, the first day of the new Congress to demand: Impeach the war criminals! The Bush Regime must go!
Some people say we should stay away from impeachment, that it’s better to just let the Republicans twist in the wind and take a loss in ‘08. How removed from reality, how enveloped in political meaninglessness do you have to be, not to see or not to care that it is the torture victims, the Iraqi families, the people of Iran, the women and gays, the immigrants and Black people you would be leaving to twist in the wind as this regime barrels forward?
Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats say that “impeachment is off the table.” But if George Bush is not impeached over these crimes, then everything he has done—the doctrine of preemptive war, the torture, the assault on the separation of church and state, the undermining of the rule of law—all of this is legitimized and will continue, no matter who becomes the next president. And it means we are complicit in all of this.
Some say—oh no, this will divide the country. Today the major media won’t mention impeachment except to say that the Republicans would love it. And many are afraid of saying things because it might incite the Republicans. Hello! Bowing down and giving them the horrific future they want without a fight, is even worse.
When you had racist vigilantes hunting down and terrorizing Black people and you had laws and good ol’ boy networks backing it all up—you had to confront it!
When you had an unjust war sending tens of thousands of young men to their deaths and destroying the Vietnamese countryside and slaughtering millions of Vietnamese—you had to confront it.
Without a confrontation, these crimes weren’t going to go away.
We are not talking about spoiled children making mischief that you can ignore long enough that they’ll eventually get bored and move on. This is a regime with a strategic plan for remaking the whole world. They have their hands on the levers of state power and they have an unthinking fanatical social base they have built up and are increasingly unleashing to intimidate and terrorize people who don’t agree with them. This reality needs to be confronted and transformed. Avoiding that political confrontation, avoiding the necessary polarization and upheaval means being complicit as all of this gets worse.
Besides, what is so wrong with polarizing people when they are wrong—and going along with great crimes?
The biggest problem right now is not that people don’t want what we are for. It is that too many people are inactive, tuned out, they don’t know how bad it is and they don’t know how they can affect things. The only way this will change is if we go out and challenge and polarize people around what is being done in our names.
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