Capitalists: “Impeach Bush”

There’s lots of anti-Bush rhetoric to be found in the media these days, but this column by Paul Craig Roberts caught my attention for a couple of reasons.

First, the column appeared in both The Chicago Tribune (and other MSM outlets via Creators Syndicate) and the muckraking newletter Counterpunch, which is edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s. Strange bedfellows.

Second, and more importantly, Roberts is not a Democrat/liberal/moderate, but someone with right-wing bona fides that are, well, unimpeachable.

For example, Roberts is the John M. Olin fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, research fellow at the Independent Institute and senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, he writes a political commentary column for Creators Syndicate. He also writes a monthly economics column for Investors Business Daily. In 1992, he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993, he was ranked as one of the top seven journalists by the Forbes Media Guide.

So, when I guy like Roberts says impeach Bush now, it’s a matter of life and death, you pay attention. (It’s not not the same as Bill Maher saying Bush must go.) Roberts says the Bush administration is “the most incompetent government in American history,” and says the “neo-conservatives” must go.

Lot’s of folks would agree, but the question becomes who would fill the void? That’s where differences in the anti-Bush camps immediately crop up. Here’s a bit from Roberts’ column:

“The destruction of New Orleans is the responsibility of the most incompetent government in American history and perhaps in all history. Americans are rapidly learning that they were deceived by the superpower hubris. The powerful US military cannot successfully occupy Baghdad or control the road to the airport–and this against an insurgency based in only 20% of the Iraqi population. Bush’s pointless war has left Washington so pressed for money that the federal government abandoned New Orleans to catastrophe.

The Bush administration is damned by its gross incompetence. Bush has squandered the lives and health of thousands of people. He has run through hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars. He has lost America’s reputation and its allies. With barbaric torture and destruction of our civil liberty, he has stripped America of its inherent goodness and morality. And now Bush has lost America’s largest port and 25 percent of its oil supply. Why? Because Bush started a gratuitous war egged on by a claque of crazy neoconservatives who have sacrificed America’s interests to their insane agenda.

The neoconservatives have brought these disasters to all Americans, Democrat and Republican alike. Now they must he held accountable. Bush and his neoconservatives are guilty of criminal negligence and must be prosecuted.”

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