Lewis Lapham, Harper's editor,on C-Span to make case for Bush impeachment.

[flpoljunkie]

It's 8:34AM, EST. Lapham said he based his article on John Conyer's impeachment work.

[rodeodance]

1. thanks, He is talking now.

[rodeodance]

2. says "within 3 hours of Pent. attach, Rummy is ordering his staff to find

information on possible link to of SH to 9/11.
Whow. i did not know it was that soon.

[rodeodance]

3. caller. saying appalled by what is happening in our country.-instilling

a system of fear to monatary gain.

[rodeodance]

4. Lapham is cool--rather laid back style of arguing his case.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

5. what wonderful stuff to wake up too!

:donut:

:popcorn:

[trof]

6. Lapham satirical quote and bio:

“Because God had chosen America as the construction site of the earthly Paradise, America’s cause was always just and nothing was ever America’s fault… corrupt foreigners commit crimes against humanity, Americans cleanse the world of its impurities.”

Born in San Francisco into a family distinguished by service and achievement, Lewis Lapham was educated at Hotchkiss School, Yale and Cambridge Universities. He was marked early for a career in journalism, working first for the San Francisco Examiner and, by age 25, covering the United Nations for the International Herald Tribune.

He joined the staff of Harper’s Magazine in 1975 and has been its editor since 1983. In an interview, Lapham describes Harper’s, which was founded in 1850, “as a journal for people who still read, who like to read, and who look upon reading as a pleasure, not as an acquisition of data.” The magazine demands “imagination on each side of the page: the courage of the writer to try to tell the truth as he or she has seen it—or heard it, or felt it, or guessed at it—and the will of the reader to take seriously, to try to grasp imaginatively, what is being said." Lapham’s own monthly column, “Notebook,” won the National Magazine Award (1995) for expressing an “exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity.”

After the publication of his first collection of essays, Fortune’s Child, critics compared him with H.L. Mencken and Montaigne. A master of ironic wit, he is also likened to Mark Twain. Lapham’s books include Money and Class in America (1988), Imperial Masquerade (1990), The Wish for Kings (1993), Hotel America…(1995), Waiting for the Barbarians (1997) and Theater of War (2002). Lapham’s December 2002 essay, “The Road to Babylon: Searching for Targets in Iraq,” was posted on the Harper’s website the following spring. He has also been the host of a documentary series for television, America’s Century, as well as host and executive editor of the series, Bookmark (1989-91).

When he appeared on television with Bill Moyers, his host said of him: “Lewis Lapham speaks the truth to power and wealth in each issue of America’s oldest political journal…In the essays he writes and the articles he publishes, he opens the veins on issues like class, power, politics.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Lewis_Lapham.html

[CottonBear]

7. "The war on terrorism is like the war on poverty or drugs."

"It's a war that can't be won."

He spoke about the fear expressed by so many callers (I'm assuming he meant the RW callers). He said that is not unreasonable for so many people to be so fearful because Bush has been telling them that the "war on terror" will last for 30 years or more. :(

[autorank]

8. He woke me up 1.5 hours early. Danm, that was good...

My clock alarm went off at 8:30 a.m. instead of 10:00. That Laplham was on, damn him. I couldn't go back to sleep it was so compelling. He did very well, handled the callers with real interest and respect, and was in control.

It's the beginning of the end for the Bush administration.

Thank you C-Span and Lewis Lapham...it'was worth getting up early to hear this wonderful news.

[flpoljunkie]

9. Read Lapham's excerpt from Harper's on "The Case for Impeachment"

http://www.harpers.org/TheCaseForImpeachment.html

The Case for Impeachment

Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush

Posted on Monday, February 27, 2006. An excerpt from an essay in the March 2006 Harper's Magazine. By Lewis H. Lapham.
A country is not only what it does—it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates. —Kurt Tucholsky

On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency's illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press—nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.

“To take away the excuse,” he said, “that we didn't know.” So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that “somehow it escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn't account for the congressman's impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November's elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President's addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:

“I don't think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news.” Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635—not a high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182 pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers's staff during the six months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime against the American people. It is a fair description. Drawing on evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of credible witnesses—government officials both extant and former, journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and foreign—the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from the truth.<1> The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the report's corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of the flies weren't in the business of killing people, they would be seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the absurd. Entitled “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War,” the Conyers report examines the administration's chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be explored within the compass of a single essay. The nature of the administration's criminal DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in a usefully robust specimen of its characteristic dishonesty.

more...