The Truth to Power Moment

I lectured the last week on Aristotle's doctrine of the mean. One of the examples was 'righteous indignation' which lay between the excess of 'envy' and the defect of 'spite' and, using the example of being outraged at the growing disparity between the rich and the poor in our society, I had been able to give an account of Aristotle's account of distributive justice as well.

Come Saturday morning, I am in the cavern of my den scrolling through the new york times.com while sipping warm, sweet coffee. And there it was, as it is below in my last entry, an op ed piece about the doctored up intel by Douglas Feith, creative writer or 'undersecretary of defense policy' under Donald Rumsfeld, used by Wolfowitz. His "intel" included such fantasies as that Mohammad Atta had met with Iraqi Foreign Intelligence personnel in Prague (I believe it was). I grew more outraged, mindful of all the deceptive reasons used by the Administration to make the war appear justifiable and necessary, and discovered to my great suprise that Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner would be present at a town hall meeting in Whitefish Bay just that afternoon.

And there I was, in the small library room with about 40 others speaking to a frowning and pissed off Jim Sensenbrenner. His willingness to attend these town hall meetings and listen to the bullshit piled on top of him was truly admirable. My card came up and, mindful of all of the accusations and bitter incriminations that I might have laid out, focused my attention on describing the deceiving of Congress and the Public about the intelligence justifying the war in Iraq. I asked him why, given that he was willing to impeach president Clinton in 1998 for that why he would not raise articles of impeachment for this. Suddenly, unbeknownst to me, like a great thunderclap, the crowd burst into spontaneous applause and yells of support.

Sensenbrenner stared at me with his ice blue eyes and maintained an even tone. He began schooling me in a teacherly tone as to the origins of impeachment, citing the standards described for it both in the Federalist Papers and in the Constitution. I could not disagree with this but I became aware of a feeling of righteous indignation within me that could take somebody to war--war with him, in particular. Fortunately I didn't act on it, but the feeling of being released and landing an axe through his brain was there. He declared that Clinton in 1998 had violated" constitutional procedures" which warranted impeachment. He then went on to make the case, in this bizarre mumbling tone which I took to be the height of obfuscation (a device anybody who has ever answered questions for a living knows how to do, viz. to switch into a kind of jargonistic rambling that gets around to making your point without laying out any kind of argument) how Bush has never committed any violation of constitutional procedures and therefore could not be tried. I interjected violently now, feeling the support of the crowd behind me, maintaining that lying to Congress and the people is a crime. He said that the evidence had been made available and that we were justified....Again, I interjected and told him that he knew this not to be true.

Before the conversation could continue, my time was up and it was off to a woman who made her case that the troops should be brought home and that Nancy Pelosi was not a hypocrite for her high hydrocarbon use. Sensenbrenner, thick skinned, pissed off establishmentarian authoritarian continued to hold court. Indefatigable and Unshakeable. Unswayed by anybody's arguments but his own. At meeting's end, I came up to his chair, shook the hand of the unshakeable one, and looked him square in his ice blue eyes with my ice blue eyes and said with a grin: "impeach him."