Counting the Reasons to Defund

The 20 Most Memorable Leftist Excesses of Public Broadcasting

Impeach Bush Now

13. Bill Moyers invites a conservative and a liberal to both argue in favor of impeaching George W. Bush (2007).

    PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers devoted his entire hour-long Bill Moyers Journal on July 13, 2007 to the need to impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney. The hour had two guests, and both were aggressively pro-impeachment: John Nichols of The Nation magazine, author of the book The Genius of Impeachment, and lawyer Bruce Fein, whom Moyers labeled a “conservative.”

     Fein claimed the Bush-Cheney mentality was “’I can then use the military to go into your home and kill anyone there, who I think is al-Qaeda or drop a rocket.’ That is overreaching. That is a claim even King George III didn’t make.” When Bush aide Sara Taylor said in a Senate hearing that she took “an oath to the President,” to Fein, “that was like the military in Germany saying, ‘My oath is to the Fuhrer, not to the country.’”

     Moyers played the skeptic with some questions, but the tone was so radical that is was not only savagely anti-Bush, but even anti-Pelosi: “You guys don’t live in La-la land. Both of you are in and around power all the time. Why doesn’t Nancy Pelosi see it her duty to take on at least the impeachment hearings that you say would educate the public?” Fein replied: “Because I think that politics has become debased so that it’s a matter of one party against another and jockeying and maneuvering. There is no longer any statesmanship.”

    In a show-ending commentary, Moyers insisted PBS should have carried the hard left’s “debate” on impeachment, “all of it, in prime time” – when even MSNBC found it too fringy to take seriously. Moyers concluded: “When we broadcast teach-ins on the Vietnam war, and the Watergate hearings during the trial of Richard Nixon, it was a real public service -- the reason PBS was created. We should keep Iraq in prime time every week -- the fighting and dying, the suffering, the debate, the politics -- the extraordinary costs. It’s months until September. This war is killing us now, body and soul.”