Too little, too late

While I was looking at the Washington Post the other day (looking for a column idea, in case you’re curious), I came upon something that I found interesting.\nIt was a guest column written by former Democratic Party presidential candidate George McGovern. The headline was “Why I Believe Bush Must Go.” Essentially, the column was a long list of the offenses that the Bush administration has allegedly committed in its seven years of existence, with McGovern drawing the conclusion that President Bush and Vice President Cheney should both be impeached.\nThis is slightly ironic because, in case you don’t know, McGovern is the man who lost the 1972 presidential election to Richard Nixon. The massive fraud perpetrated by Nixon in that campaign led eventually to his own impeachment.\nSo I guess McGovern knows impeachable offenses when he sees them.\nI don’t have too much of a problem with McGovern saying this. For one thing, he makes a fairly good point. This administration probably has committed a fair number of impeachable offenses. At the very least, it has done significantly worse than having sex in the Oval Office. McGovern asks a good question: Has any administration in the nation’s history been more damaging than the Bush-Cheney administration? I would argue “no.”\nThere is one problem here, though. Why is now the time for this? \nThe Bush presidency is nearly over. It’s an election year, so around this time next year a new president will be inaugurated. At that point, it will be up to the new president to start to fix the damage, and up to history to judge the past eight years. At this point, it seems that any impeachment proceedings would be largely for show, since it’s unlikely that they could be finished before the election and would therefore be useless. It seems like the smarter thing for Congress to do would be to work on fixing the country’s problems because the time for impeachment has passed.\nI’m mostly just infuriated that it’s taken this long for someone to bring up this possibility. Why did it take seven years for a well-known – albeit a bit aging – public figure to say something like this? Why has it taken so long, in fact, for people to catch on to the fact that this president hasn’t done such a great job? \nIt really says something about how little attention the average person pays to politics, and to how much the average person just follows what he’s told. The American public has been lied to, spied on and sent to die for little to no reason for about seven years now, and only in the past year or so have people started to realize it. Impeachment isn’t going to save us now. The best course of action is to learn from the mistakes of the first part of this century, grow and adapt and get to work healing the damage done.