From the must-read (in full at source, if at all possible - it's very lengthy and in a small space probably difficult to read on mobile devices, if well-worth the time) transcript of a brilliant and heart-lifting discussion (which should wallpaper the internet) specified at your link - and thanks so much for providing it, snoopydawg! This is the language and these are the terms we must use, rather than accept the propaganda and pathological worldview we are fed - and we must read such things to refresh not only our fighting spirits but our memories as to what democracy really is and what life in an affluent democracy ought to be for all people.

http://billmoyers.com/content/tough-talk-on-impeachment-with-bruce-fein-...

... JOHN NICHOLS: People don't want to let this go. They do not accept Nancy Pelosi's argument that impeachment is, quote unquote, off the table. Because I guess maybe they're glad she didn't take some other part of the Constitution off the table like freedom of speech. But they also don't accept the argument that, oh, well, there's a presidential campaign going on. So let's just hold our breath till Bush and Cheney get done.

When I go out across America, what I hear is something that's really very refreshing and very hopeful about this country. An awfully lot of Americans understand what Thomas Jefferson understood. And that is that the election of a president does not make him a king for four years. That if a president sins against the Constitution and does damage to the republic, the people have a right in an organic process to demand of their House of Representatives, the branch of government closest to the people, that it act to remove that president. And I think that sentiment is afoot in the land. ...

...BRUCE FEIN: Yeah, of course, the difference is one thing to claim that, you know, Gulf of Tonkin resolution was too broadly drafted. But we're talking about assertions of power that affect the individual liberties of every American citizen. Opening your mail, your e-mails, your phone calls. Breaking and entering your homes. Creating a pall of fear and intimidation if you say anything against the president you may find retaliation very quickly. We're claiming he's setting precedents that will lie around like loaded weapons anytime there's another 9/11.

Right now the victims are people whose names most Americans can't pronounce. And that's why they're not so concerned. They will start being Browns and Jones and Smiths. And that precedent is being set right now. And one of the dangers that I see is it's not just President Bush but the presidential candidates for 2008 aren't standing up and saying --

BRUCE FEIN: -- "If I'm president, I won't imitate George Bush." That shows me that this is a far deeper problem than Mr. Bush and Cheney. ...

(The claiming of some bizarre ownership right by public servants in illicitly handing over control of domestic law from their own countries and people, which they are sworn to serve, for their brutal and rapidly fatal rapine by thousands of pathologically greedy, ruthless corporations and billionaires involves even greater '...assertions of power that affect the individual liberties... (and everything else) ...of every ... citizen ...' of every country so betrayed. Hillary, as we recall, uses the criminal Bush Administration as precedent for her own actions.)

...JOHN NICHOLS: Well, let's try a metaphor. Let's say that -- when George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, he used the wood to make a little box. And in that box the president puts his powers. We've taken things out. We've put things in over the years.

On January 20th, 2009, if George Bush and Dick Cheney are not appropriately held to account this administration will hand off a toolbox with more powers than any president has ever had, more powers than the founders could have imagined. And that box may be handed to Hillary Clinton or it may be handed to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or someone else. But whoever gets it, one of the things we know about power is that people don't give away the tools. They don't give them up. The only way we take tools out of that box is if we sanction George Bush and Dick Cheney now and say the next president cannot govern as these men have.

...BRUCE FEIN: Well, that's accurate but also we do find this peculiarity that Congress is giving up powers voluntarily. because there's nothing right now, Bill, that would prevent Congress from the immediate shutting down all of George Bush's and Dick Cheney's illegal programs. Simply saying there's no money to collect foreign intelligence -- ...

(As with Fast Track for all of the other corporate coups in train behind the TPP, with some of the most obviously worst things evidently packed into these, which can be auto-passed by a single person without discussion or public awareness, if the TPP gets through and corporations become the law over serf-states. Only now it's that ruthless hostile powers - thousands of them - can do whatever they like to free citizens and everything within their countries, being not only above the law but becoming a law unto themselves over the people. Corruption - including election fraud - always gets worse when it's left to stand 'as a done deal'... '... if George Bush and Dick Cheney are not appropriately held to account this administration will hand off a toolbox with more powers than any president has ever had, more powers than the founders could have imagined. ...' The Founders had specific concerns about government/corporations gaining undue power over the people and did their best to protect against this in some remarkable documents more politicians should read.)

... BRUCE FEIN: Let me underscore one of the things that you remember, Bill, because I was there at the time of Watergate. And this relates to one political official in the White House, Sara Taylor's testimony. And claiming that George Bush could tell her to be silent.

BILL MOYERS: That was a great moment when Sara Taylor said, "I took an oath to uphold the president." Did you see that?

BRUCE FEIN: Yes. And that was like the military in Germany saying, "My oath is to the Fuhrer, not to the country." She took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I did, too, when I was in the government. There's no oath that says, "I'm loyal to a president even if he defiles the Constitution."

JOHN NICHOLS: Ever. ...

(Recall the shift to 'I'm with her' introduced by Hillary's campaign - placing loyalties to personalities and gender over everything else. I suspect that the slavish covering up for Hillary and her actions as Secretary of State may be due more to her protection by TPRB and to fear/greed relating to these than to any personal devotion to her.)

... BRUCE FEIN: -- and resignation. And now we have a comparable situation where a Harriet Miers could perhaps expose things regarding President Bush's knowledge of the electronic surveillance program or the firing of U.S. attorneys, which seems to contradict what Alberto Gonzalez has said about White House involvement. And yet President Bush is saying, "You can't talk, Harriet Miers, because I don't want any of that political or legal embarrassment." And unlike John Dean who brought the Constitution forward with his testimony, Harriet Miers still is silent.

BILL MOYERS: And you would put that in the bill of particular about impeachment?

BRUCE FEIN: Certainly with regard to the one example of the abuse of presidential authority, seeking to obstruct a legitimate congressional investigation by a preposterous assertion of executive privilege. Remember, in a democracy, in -- under the Constitution, transparency and sunshine is the rule. The exception is only for matters of grave national security secrets. That certainly doesn't apply here. ...

... JOHN NICHOLS: You -- we're at this table because the fact of the matter is that impeachment has moved well up the list of things we can talk about because of the Scooter Libby affair. Now, should it be the one that tipped it? I think Bruce and I would probably both agree no. There are probably more important issues. But the Scooter Libby affair gets to the heart of what I think an awfully lot of Americans are concerned about with this administration and with the executive branch in general, that it is lawless, that it can rewrite the rules for itself, that it can protect itself.

And, you know, the founders anticipated just such a moment. If you look at the discussions in the Federalist Papers but also at the Constitutional Convention, when they spoke about impeachment, one of the things that Madison and George Mason spoke about was the notion that you needed the power to impeach particularly as regards to pardons and commutations because a president might try to take the burden of the law off members of his administration to prevent them from cooperating with Congress in order to expose wrongdoings by the president himself. And so Madison said that is why we must have the power to impeach. Because otherwise a president might be able to use his authority and pardons and such to prevent an investigation from getting to him. ...

('... BRUCE FEIN: Certainly with regard to the one example of the abuse of presidential authority, seeking to obstruct a legitimate congressional investigation by a preposterous assertion of executive privilege. ...' How about quietly using Clinton/corporate/TPTB privilege to do so - even when not in public office at the time? This is evidently how the Clintons evade the repercussions anyone else would suffer for their toxic acts in hiding beneath equally toxic Teflon everyone notices but is supposed to think themselves unable to do anything about due to the level of corrupt ever-increasing because it's 'left to stand as a done deal?.)

...BRUCE FEIN: I think the spark against the Libby commutation is a little bit different focus. I think it's less on the idea he's covering up for Cheney or Bush than the indication that Bush is totally heedless of any honor for law and accountability. That he has special rules for him and his cabinet. You may recall at the outset of the investigation he said, "Anybody in my office who is responsible for this leak will not work for me." Karl Rove was shown to leak and Karl Rove was still sitting in the White House. And he says, "Well, he will issue a commutation here." But he's not issued commutations in similar circumstances to anybody else.

Moreover, the perjury of the obstruction of justice of Libby is a carbon copy of Clinton, which Republicans, including me, supported. That's why I said you've got to give a stiff sentence here. How can you say that Clinton deserves impeachment and here you're commuting someone who did the same thing. And it's that sort of outrage that this is now a sneering attitude towards everybody else. "I am king. You play by other people's rules, but as long as I am in the White House, I get to play by my rules." That is something that --

BRUCE FEIN: -- offends everybody. ...

... JOHN NICHOLS: Sneering is not an impeachable sentence. But the founders who had recently fought a revolution against a king named George would tell you that monarchical behavior, the behavior of a king, acting like a king, is an impeachable offense. You need not look for specific laws or statutes. What you need to look for is a pattern of behavior that says that the presidency is superior not merely to Congress but to the laws of the land, to the rules of law. And that is why we ought to be discussing impeachment. Not because of George Bush and Dick Cheney but because we are establishing a presidency that does not respect the rule of law. And people, Americans, are rightly frightened by that. Their fear is the fear of the founders. It is appropriate. It is necessary. ...

('... I think it's less on the idea he's covering up for Cheney or Bush than the indication that Bush is totally heedless of any honor for law and accountability. That he has special rules for him and his cabinet. ...'
Her Royal Coronation has not yet occurred, but the Clintons have invariably demonstrated: '...a pattern of behavior that says that the... (Clintons are) ... superior not merely to Congress but to the laws of the land, to the rules of law. ...' And please note that Hillary uses the Bush Admin as precedent for various dirty things she's done/does, whether they'd actually gone as far as she has or not and regardless of circumstances, even in a public debate, as though this makes it acceptable to the public and US Constitution that she thereby risks/cheats/betrays. Heck, she's been promoting doing away with the rule of domestic law entirely and letting corporations and billionaires freely 'legalize' whatever they want to do to others - with no middle-men such as herself any longer necessary. Just corporate management and enforcers.)

...BILL MOYERS: You're saying you want the judiciary committee to call formal hearings on the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney?

BRUCE FEIN: Yes. Because there are political crimes that have been perpetrated in combination. It hasn't been one, the other being in isolation. And the hearings have to be not into this is a Republican or Democrat. This is something that needs to set a precedent, whoever occupies the White House in 2009. You do not want to have that occupant, whether it's John McCain or Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani or John Edwards to have this authority to go outside the law and say, "I am the law. I do what I want. No one else's view matters."

JOHN NICHOLS: The hearings are important. There's no question at that. And we should be at that stage. Remember, Thomas Jefferson and others, the founders, suggested that impeachment was an organic process. That information would come out. The people would be horrified. They would tell their representatives in Congress, "You must act upon this." Well, the interesting thing is we are well down the track in the organic process. The people are saying it's time. We need some accountability.

BILL MOYERS: But Nancy Pelosi doesn't agree.

JOHN NICHOLS: Nancy Pelosi is wrong. Nancy Pelosi is disregarding her oath of office. She should change course now. And more importantly, members of her caucus and responsible Republicans should step up. It is not enough -- ...

...JOHN NICHOLS: But they do so, by and large, in a cautious way. They say, "Well, the president's done too much." Let's start to use the "i" word. Impeach is a useful word. It is a necessary word. The founders in the Constitution made no mention of corporation or political parties or conventions or primaries or caucuses. But they made six separate references to impeachment. They wanted us to know this word, and they wanted us to use it.

BILL MOYERS: You're -- does this process have to go all the way to the end? Do Bush and Cheney have to be impeached before it serves the public?

JOHN NICHOLS: I think that what Bush and Cheney have done makes a very good case that the public and the future would be well served if it did go all the way to the end. But there is absolutely a good that comes of this if the process begins, if we take it seriously. And the founders would have told you that impeachment is a dialogue. It is a discourse. And it is an educational process. If Congress were to get serious about the impeachment discussions, to hold the hearings, to begin that dialogue, they would begin to educate the American people and perhaps themselves about the system of checks and balances, about the powers of the presidency, about, you know, what we can expect and what we should expect of our government.

And so I think that when Jefferson spoke about this wonderful notion of his that said the tree of liberty must be watered every 20 years with the blood of patriots, I don't know that he was necessarily talked about warfare. I think he was saying that at a pretty regular basis we ought to seek to hold our -- highest officials to account and that process, the seeking to hold them to account, wherever it holds up, is -- a necessary function of the republic. If we don't do it, we move further and further toward an imperial presidency. ...

(And, as has been pointed out by others, people become conditioned over time to accept a high level of corruption which shocks much of the rest of the world - and 'socially engineered' into learned helplessness.)

...BRUCE FEIN: The great genius of the founding fathers, their revolutionary idea, with the chief mission of the state is to make you and them free to pursue their ambitions and faculties. Not to build empires, not to aggrandize government. That's the mission of the state, to make them free, to think, to chart their own destiny. And the burden is on government to give really good explanations as to why they're taking these extraordinary measures. And on that score, Bush has flunked on every single occasion. And we need to get the American people to think. Every time that there's an incursion on freedom, they have to demand why. What is the explanation? Give me a good reason before I give up my freedom.

BILL MOYERS: But read that prologue of the Constitution. The first obligation is to defend the people, to defend their freedom, to defend their rights. And I hear people out there talking in their living rooms right now, Bruce and John, saying, "But wait a minute, you know, we've got these terrorists. We know. Look what happened in London just two weeks ago. We know they're out there. Who else is looking out for us except Bush and Cheney?"

BRUCE FEIN: And Cheney and Bush have shown that these measures are optical. Take, for instance, these military conditions that combine judge, jury, and prosecutors. What have they done? They tried the same offenses that are tried in civilian courts. American Taliban John Walker Lindh got 20 years in the civilian courts. And then we have the same offense, David Hicks, he gets nine months in military prison. Why are you creating these extraordinary measures? They aren't needed. We have the foreign intelligence --

BILL MOYERS: -- we don't need to do what Bush --

BRUCE FEIN: No, we don't. They're doing these for optical purposes.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean "optical"?

BRUCE FEIN: They're trying to create the appearance that they're tougher than all of their opponents because they're willing to violate the law, even though the violations have nothing to do with actually defeating the terrorism. And we have instances where the president now for years has flouted the Foreign Intelligence Act. He's never said why the act has ever inhibited anybody. Remember, this act has been around for over a quarter of a century, and no president ever said it impaired his gathering of foreign intelligence. And suddenly the president's, "No, we have to violate it and flout it because it doesn't work." Well, why? He's never explained it. He's never explained why this act stopped gathering of all the intelligence that was needed to fight the terrorists. ...

(Hillary, the corporate candidate, to whom rules and laws do not apply, eagerly portraying herself to big donors as being, against smaller, weaker countries/individuals, tougher than dirt and far dirtier. But: '
BILL MOYERS: But read that prologue of the Constitution. The first obligation is to defend the people, to defend their freedom, to defend their rights. ...' Not to promote to Americans and those in multiple other countries that their leaders can hand over their law, rights and freedoms and tell them to frack off into oblivion.)

... JOHN NICHOLS: And that Democrat's first responsibility is to go to Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, the person who decides what committee assignments they may have and even how nice an office they may get, and say, "You know, Nancy, I respect you. I respect you greatly, Mrs. Speaker. But the country's more important. So you can get mad at me. You can, you know, push back internally and whatever. But I'm going to the American people and I'm going to talk to them like Bruce Fein just did. Now, my sense is the response to the American people and, frankly, the response of a lot of other members of Congress would be to stand up and applaud. But you have to have that initial courage to do so.

BRUCE FEIN: I think that you have to have not only the courage but you have to have that conviction because it's part of your being.

BILL MOYERS: But the --

BRUCE FEIN: You understand what the United States is about.

BILL MOYERS: But by your -- by what you're saying, you're admitting that nobody has that conviction because it's not happening.

BRUCE FEIN: I agree. And it's hard to know how to just make it happen by spontaneous combustion, Bill. And that's the frustrating element here. Because without that those intellectual and temperamental ingredients, it just isn't going to happen. You do need a leadership element in there. And I don't see it either in the House or the Senate now. ...

(This was in 2007 - do believe I recall reading/seeing video of Bernie speaking up about a number of such issues but not being covered by media, or am I mistaken about this?)

...BRUCE FEIN: -- we cannot entrust the reins of power, unchecked power, with these people. They're untrustworthy. They're asserting theories of governments that are monarchical. We don't want them to exercise it. We don't want Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani or anyone in the future to exercise that. ...

(Nobody, not even the 'trustworthy, should have unchecked power over others; it's been said that even a saint, if never gainsaid or restricted in any way, will become a tyrant over time.)

...JOHN NICHOLS: You are seeing impeachment as a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis. Don't mistake the medicine for the disease. When you have a constitutional crisis, the founders are very clear. They said there is a way to deal with this. We don't have to have a war. We don't have to raise an army and go to Washington. We have procedures in place where we can sanction a president appropriately, do what needs to be done up to the point of removing him from office and continue the republic. So we're not talking here about taking an ax to government. Quite the opposite. We are talking about applying some necessary strong medicine that may cure not merely the crisis of the moment but, done right -- ...

(This is a way to avoid a violent revolution, one TPTB don't want the people to have - duh, they're corrupt and think they have the people convinced of their powerlessness. But they Bern.)

... BRUCE FEIN: It's not an attack on Bush and Cheney in the sense of their personal -- attacks. Listen, if you impeach them, they can live happily ever after into their --

JOHN NICHOLS: And go to San Clemente.

BRUCE FEIN: Yes, go to San Clemente or go back to the ranch or whatever. But it's saying no, it's the Constitution that's more important than your aggrandizing of power. And not just for you because the precedent that would be set would bind every successor in the presidency as well, no matter Republican, Democrat, Independent, or otherwise.

JOHN NICHOLS: The fact of the matter is that, again, the genius of impeachment is it tells the president that, wow, there is a Congress. And that Congress is on your case. And it causes, I think at its best, it causes a president to want to prove he can cooperate, to want to prove he can live within the law. ...

(This was in 2007. I don't think such as the Clintons can be convinced to try living within the law - although Obama might well have been happy to have had that option when he entered office.)

... JOHN NICHOLS: But also we would have hit that educational moment, that rare moment where a president of the United States has been forced to go before the American people and say, "Oh, yeah, I just remembered, you're the boss. You are the bosses. Not me. And that I am not a king." Again, this is why raising impeachment at this point, it's a very late point, is so important. Because we are defining what the presidency will be in the future today because we do know the high crimes and misdemeanors of George Bush and Dick Cheney. They have been well illustrated even by a rather lax media. They have been discussed in Congress.

If we know these things and we do not hold them to account, then we are saying, as a people and as a Congress, we are saying that we can find out that you have violated the rule of law. We can find out that you have disregarded the Constitution. You -- we can find out that you've done harm to the republic. But there will still be no penalty for that. If that's the standard that we've set, it will hold. It will not be erased in the future.

(The Clintons, the corporations, billionaires, TPTB [and shouldn't be at all,] have been learning this for a very long time and are now willing to destroy civilization and life on the planet within decades for more personal profit now.)

BRUCE FEIN: One of the lessons we should have learned from the Nixon impeachment is that it didn't quite fulfill its purpose because Nixon was never compelled to renounce what he'd done.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yes.

BRUCE FEIN: And after which he boasted that when the president does it it's legal. He wasn't repentant at all. If we had insisted maybe as a condition of the pardon or otherwise, you need to repent. We are a government of laws, not of men. And it's wrong for anyone to assert unchecked power. That would have had such a pedagogical effect that would have deterred anything in the future. We've got to make certain this time around we get that proper acknowledgement from the --

JOHN NICHOLS: -- there was a group of members, Democratic members of the House, who went to Tipp O'Neil and to --

BILL MOYERS: Then speaker of the House.

JOHN NICHOLS: -- back in 1974, after Nixon had resigned, and said, "We must continue the impeachment process." It is, under the Constitution, certainly appropriate to do so. And we must continue it because we have to close the circle on presidential power. And the leaders in Congress, the Democratic leaders in Congress at the time said, "No, the country has suffered too much." Well, this is the problem. Our leaders treat us as children. They think that we cannot handle a serious dialogue about the future of our republic, about what it will be and how it will operate. And so, you know, to an extent, we begin to act like children. We, you know, follow other interests. We decide to be entertained rather than to be citizens.

Well, you know, and Bruce makes frequent references to the fall of the Roman Empire. You know, that's the point at where the fall comes. It doesn't come because of a bad leader. It doesn't come because of a dysfunctional Congress. It comes when the people accept that role of the child or of the subject and are no longer citizens. And so I think this moment becomes so very, very important because we know the high crimes and misdemeanors.

The people themselves have said, if the polls are correct, that, you know, something ought to be done. If nothing is done, if we do not step forward at this point, if we do not step up to this point, then we have, frankly, told the people, you know, you can even recognize that the king has no clothes, but we're not gonna put any clothes on him. And at that point, the country is in very, very dire circumstances. ...

(Saying the words and getting off scott-free likely won't change a psychopath from '... after which he boasted that when the president does it it's legal. ...' to '... "Oh, yeah, I just remembered, you're the boss. You are the bosses. Not me. And that I am not a king." ...'. Bush 2, for example, went to another age in another country - against which America had rebelled to throw off its colonial status and monarchy for democracy - to take a grossly outdated 'The King can do no wrong' law from centuries back so that he could (if I recall correctly) ignore the EPA to allow industrial pollution of rivers with impunity and to carry on from there as though he owned the place and people his office was meant to serve. Congress did what? to stop him? In a democracy, nobody is or can be 'above the law' - and nobody, in or out of public office, can 'legally and bindingly' dispose of the law of their land to give control of the country and people away either.)

Please, vote against - not for - evil of any stripe, or we'll all get what nobody deserves, barring those seeking to inflict it on the world. If enough people vote Green, guess who gets the most votes - especially with Indies forming the largest voting group in the US?

And of course good ole Bill Clinton helped the monopoly enormously by changing the law. jamess had a great, if older, page of info including that which I came across some time back, although I'm too tired to look it up now...

So Siddown, Shaddup and STOP QUESTIONING That, Stupid Prole!

(snarkity-doo-dah)