June 23, 2003
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"When are they going to impeach President Bush?" my Martian friend Yyuran
asked me the other day.
I stared at him in disbelief, thinking he had to be joking. He is always trying to rattle me. "For what?" I spluttered. "For lying you into war. He said that the reason you had to invade Iraq was because it had weapons of mass destruction." "Right." "Well, where are they?" "I don't know. Who cares? We won, didn't we?" "It doesn't matter to you that he lied to dupe you into war?" "All politicians lie," I said. Sometimes Yyuran is so naive. "You impeached your former president for lying." "That was different; Clinton lied under oath." "He lied about a private sexual matter." "He still lied," I said. "Did you invade another country because Clinton lied? Did American soldiers die because of his lies?" Here we go again, I muttered to myself. He seems to think he's some kind of alien Rush Limbaugh who knows everything about everything. But I know Rush Limbaugh, and Yyuran is no Rush Limbaugh. "It's not the same thing. And anyway, you can forget about impeachment. There's not going to be any impeachment. Period!" "Why not?" He looked genuinely puzzled. It had taken me a long time to discover that when he began violently shaking his head from side to side like a windshield wiper on high, he was expressing frustration or puzzlement. "The Republicans are in charge of Congress and won't allow it." "You only impeach Democrats?" he asked, still shaking his head to the point I was afraid it would fall off. "No, of course not. President Nixon would have been impeached if he hadn't resigned, and he was a Republican." "He lied about some robbery?" "Yeah. Something like that. A break-in." "So lying about sex is impeachable; and lying about robbery is impeachable; but lying to go to war is all right?" "Well, yeah. I guess. Lots of presidents have lied to get us into wars they wanted and no one else did. President Johnson lied us into a wider Vietnam War by claiming a ship of ours was attacked when it wasn't." "Your Constitution says a President can be removed for 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' You don't think lying to drag your country into war, killing thousands of innocent people in the country you invade, killing your own soldiers isn't a crime?" For a spacemen who only came here a relatively short time ago and barely knows us, he can sure be judgmental. "You don't know what you're talking about," I said. "Besides, nobody but you is even thinking about impeachment." "A lot of people on the Internet are," he said. "A few kooks." "I googled "Bush" and "impeachment" and got 79,700 hits," he said. "Googled it? You googled it?" I giggled. The way he so easily picks up American slang cracks me up. He just stared at me. "OK, OK," I said. So a lot of kooks on the Internet are talking nonsense. Doesn't mean a thing." "That's a shame," he said. · · · · · ·
Related Internal Links: The Yyuran Series Landing A Campaign Visual (May 2003) It's Just Good Business (Oct. 2002) Untangling The Mideast For A Martian (July 2002) The Wrong Stuff (May 2002) We Are A Peaceful People (March 2002) A Famous Victory (Jan. 2002) Explaining Nukes to a Martian (Feb. 2001) Iraq on Swans Humor on Swans Deck Deckert has spent nearly two decades as copy editor, wire editor and news editor at several metropolitan newspapers, including the Miami Herald and Miami News, before becoming a freelance writer. His articles and stories on everything from alligator farming to UFOs have appeared in numerous U.S. publications. He has written two young adult novels under a pen name, and co-authored a novel about the NATO war on Yugoslavia, Letters from the Fire, with Alma Hromic. Do you wish to share your opinion? We invite your comments. E-mail the Editor. Please include your full name, address and phone number. If we publish your opinion we will only include your name, city, state, and country. Please, feel free to insert a link to this article on your Web site or to disseminate its URL on your favorite lists, quoting the first paragraph or providing a summary. However, please DO NOT steal, scavenge or repost this work without the expressed written authorization of Swans. This material is copyrighted, © Deck Deckert 2003. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. |
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