Salt Lake Mayor Takes on Bush
Impeachment Trail


Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson may have been greeted with foot-stomping enthusiasm Monday night as he preached the gospel of impeaching President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to a crowd of about 250 at the Veterans Memorial Building on Monday. But at the Santa Barbara City Council, the idea of passing an impeachment resolution still remains an orphan in search of a parent. Anderson has emerged as a compelling political curiosity — the nation's most liberal mayor emerging from the reliably conservative state of Utah. Anderson seeks to connect the political left and right by appealing to "the core values" he says animate all Americans. "If we do not call for accountability, we are complicit," Anderson thundered to repeated ovations. "We either condone by our inaction, or we hold Bush accountable to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we are so much better than this."

Anderson accused the Bush-Cheney White House of ignoring repeated warnings of a terrorist attack just prior to 9/11, and then using the emotional fallout from that attack to stampede the American public — and its elected leaders — into war. "Iraq never posed any threat to us," Anderson said more than once. "We attacked a nation that posed no threat to our security. That's a crime against peace, the same crime for which people were convicted in Nuremburg," he said....

Excerpted from the Santa Barbara Independent