I Still Love Vermont

From The Ver­mont Guardian:

Ver­mont: 36 Towns Call for Impeach­ment Probe of Pres­i­dent

Vot­ers in three dozen Ver­mont towns want Con­gress to begin an impeach­ment probe of Pres. George W. Bush and Vice Pres. Dick Cheney.

…

There are 251 towns in Ver­mont, but not all hold town meet­ings.

More than a dozen towns passed mea­sures call­ing for the imme­di­ate with­draw­al of troops from Iraq, and to care for them when they were back on U.S. soil. Dover also reject­ed the troop mea­sure. About 20 towns had one of the items warned on their town meet­ing bal­lot, while many oth­ers took up the issue dur­ing “oth­er busi­ness” at the end of the meet­ing.

.…
Here is the text of each of the two res­o­lu­tions:

IMPEACHMENT RESOLUTION
Where­as George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have:

1. delib­er­ate­ly mis­led the nation about the threat from Iraq in order to jus­ti­fy a war,
2. con­doned the tor­ture of pris­on­ers in vio­la­tion of the Gene­va Con­ven­tion and US law,
3. approved ille­gal elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens with­out a war­rant, and,

Where­as these actions have under­mined our Con­sti­tu­tion­al sys­tem of gov­ern­ment, dam­aged the rep­u­ta­tion of Amer­i­ca, and threat­ened our nation­al secu­ri­ty,

There­fore, the vot­ers of the town of ___________________ call upon the U.S. House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives to inves­ti­gate these charges, and if the inves­ti­ga­tion sup­ports the charges, vote to impeach George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney as pro­vid­ed in the Con­sti­tu­tion of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca. This res­o­lu­tion shall be signed by the Town Clerk and for­ward­ed to both the Speak­er and the Clerk of the US House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, and Rep­re­sen­ta­tive John Cony­ers of the House Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee.

SOLDIERS HOME NOW RESOLUTION
“Shall the vot­ers of the town of __________________ advise the Pres­i­dent, Con­gress and Vermont’s state and fed­er­al office hold­ers that ___________________ and its cit­i­zens strong­ly sup­port the men and women serv­ing in all branch­es of the Unit­ed States Armed Forces in Iraq and believe that the best way to sup­port them is to bring each and every one of them home now and take good care of them when they get home.”

The towns that did pass the res­o­lu­tion includ­ed Bris­tol, Burke, Calais, Crafts­bury, Dum­mer­ston, East Mont­pe­lier, Greens­boro, Guil­ford, Grafton, Hart­land, Jamaica, Jeri­cho, John­son, Marl­boro, Mid­dle­bury, Mont­gomery, Mor­ris­town, New­bury, New­fane, Peru, Plain­field, Put­ney, Rich­mond, Rochester, Rox­bury, St. Johns­bury, Spring­field, Stan­nard, Sun­der­land, Town­shend, Tun­bridge, Ver­shire, War­ren, West­min­ster, Wilm­ing­ton, and Wood­bury. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Wait­s­field (which neigh­bors War­ren) was not among them, but I was pleased to see that Ver­shire, where I spent some hap­py sum­mers when The Walden School was locat­ed there back in the 80’s, was one of the towns who did.

For those peo­ple who say that the prob­lem with impeach­ing Bush is that you end up with Cheney as Pres­i­dent, pay close atten­tion to the fact that both men are named in the res­o­lu­tion. I also like the fact that they added the part about tak­ing care of the troops when the got home. These days, with Bush and his cronies doing ‘busi­ness as usu­al’ with Health Care for war vet­er­ans, just as they did with the rebuild­ing of Iraq or New Orleans, which is hand­ing out favours to pri­vate con­trac­tors and then walk­ing away as it pro­ceed­ed to turn into a dis­as­ter, one has to spell out what should be obvi­ous respon­si­bil­i­ties, like human decen­cy and prop­er over­sight.

Nice­ly done, Ver­mont. If we weren’t in Cana­da, we’d be in that Town Hall, vot­ing to Impeach with you. Even as ashamed as I usu­al­ly am of the US these days, I can always look to Ver­mont for signs of the coun­try I used to know.