Articles of (and On) Impeachment

The manner in which the MSM has treated the issue of impeachment (of, particularly, Vice President Cheney) is one of casual, if not embarrassed, dismissal. A quick search of the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times and Boston Globe provided scant results. Here are some:
The effort by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) in November to bring his bill to the House floor calling for the impeachment of Cheney was described by the NY Times editorial board thusly:

"It is hard to know which effort has longer odds, the bid by Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, to become president of the United States, or his bid to unseat Vice President Dick Cheney by impeaching him."

At the Wapo on Tuesday, during their "Post Politics Hour" where White House and Congressional reporters take questions from readers, one reader (and from Canada, no less) wondered why the issue gets short shrift: "Can you explain why the move by three members of the judiciary committee for impeachment hearings against the Vice President has not received much media attention? I didn't see anything in the online Washington Post, for instance. Rep. Wexler apparently has gathered 80,000 signatures supporting his position on his Web site. This appears to be big news to me.

Michael Abramowitz:
To be quite honest, I am not aware of whether we have written about this. We have gotten these questions in one form or another for several years: Impeachment is not going to be happening under this Congress, even if there are some law-makers who think it is a good idea. So the media moves on to other things.

Over at the LA Times, a search turned up an article by a neuropsychiatrist on the need for assessments on the brain health of presidential condidates (probably not a bad idea), and an obituary on the death of Henry Hyde, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and, ironically, the one "who presided over impeachment proceedings against President Clinton."

At the Boston Globe, meanwhile, a search there produced an editorial that made passing reference to Kucinich's "no-hoper effort to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney" in a piece on President Bush's veto of the SCHIP legislation.

And if you find this a bit peculiar, it'll strike you even more so in light of the failed efforts by three House Judiciary Committee members, Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez )D-IL, and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) to have their editorial printed by these same newspapers cited above, calling for impeachment. Said Wexler,

"We laid out precisely why the House Judiciary Committee should open up hearings. … And we set out in an op-ed why we should do it, and none of the major newspapers in the country — the New York Times or the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the LA Times — they chose not to run it.
I thought it was a fairly significant statement by the mainstream media that when members of the House Judiciary Committee lay out a credible claim for why impeachment hearings should begin regarding the Vice President of the United States, and they refuse to run it, then we decided well we would start this website…and see what the feeling was in terms of mainstream America."

Here's a succinct rundown of reasons for impeachment by former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman (who also sat on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate):

"There is little serious debate about whether Bush administration actions -- wiretapping without court approval (violating the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act), authorizing and facilitating mistreatment of detainees (violating U.S. treaties and criminal laws), starting the Iraq war on a basis of lies, exaggerations and misstatements (an abuse of power) -- meet the Constitutional standard."

Not a bad summation of the facts. Too bad they can't be found, along with the Wexler and colleagues editorial, in any MSM newspapers.