Wilkerson Sees Grounds For Impeachment of Bush/Cheney

Powell's Chief of Staff Wilkerson is loyal to the truth, and the spirit that was the once honored Secretary of State and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces.
Powell was loyal to his President, a President who didn't deserve him. In that way, Powell was the good soldier. But as Secretary of State, he had another job: representing the US to the world. While he bucked the Administration on a lot of issues, when push came to shove about Iraq, he buckled under pressure of Rumsfeld and Cheney. The cabal then left him without much of a role at State. The cabal was running diplomacy, the Department of State had been effectively sidelined. Powell knew it. I suspect he buckled hoping he could still make a difference, if not in Iraq, maybe Jerusalem. Thus he stayed on well beyond his welcome, meeting with Israeli and Palestinian representatives. But Bush gave him no support. Powell had the power to talk, nothing else. Nothing was done.
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"I really do think that our founding fathers, Hamilton, Washington, Monroe, Madison, would all be astounded that over the course of our short history as a country, 200 plus years, we haven't used that little two to three lines in Article II of the Constitution more frequently, the impeachment clause. I do believe that they would have thought had they been asked by you or whomever at the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia 'Do you think this will be exercised?' they would have said 'Of course it will, every generation they'll have to throw some bastard out'. That's a form of accountability too. It's ultimate accountability."


After an interruption, Wilkerson continued: "The language in that article, the language in those two or three lines about impeachment is nice and precise – it's high crimes and misdemeanors. You compare Bill Clinton's peccadilloes for which he was impeached to George Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors or Dick Cheney's high crimes and misdemeanors, and I think they pale in significance."


Ashbrook asked for some examples of such high crimes and misdemeanors, and Wilkerson replied: "I think that the caller was right. I think we went into this war for specious reasons. I think we went into this war not too much unlike the way we went into the Spanish American War with the Hearst press essentially goading the American people and the leadership into war. That was a different time in a different culture, in a different America. We're in a very different place today and I think we essentially got goaded into the war through some of the same means."