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Poll: Majority Support Impeaching Bush the War Pig

Monday, 16 January 2006

New Zogby Poll Shows Majority of Americans Support Impeaching Bush for
Wiretapping

By a margin of 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching
President Bush if he
wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new
poll commissioned by
AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional
investigation of
President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The poll was conducted by Zogby International, the highly-regarded
non-partisan polling company.
The poll interviewed 1,216 U.S. adults from January 9-12.

"The American people are not buying Bush's outrageous claim that he has the
power to wiretap
American citizens without a warrant. Americans believe terrorism can be
fought without turning
our own government into Big Brother," said AfterDowningStreet.org co-founder
Bob Fertik.

"Bush admits he ordered illegal warantless wiretapping, but says it began in
response to 9/11
and was limited to a small number of calls to or from Al Qaeda," Fertik said.
"But recent
reports suggest wiretapping affected a much larger number of Americans, and a
report in Friday's
Truthout. says the wiretapping began before 9/11."

"The upcoming Senate hearings on White House wiretapping could be as dramatic
as the Watergate
hearings in 1973. A majority of Americans have already believe Congress
should look into grounds
for impeachment, yet we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in the
Corporate Media. If Bush
ordered warrantless wiretapping long before the terrorist attack on 9/11,
then Americans will
realize that George Bush came into office determined to shred the
Constitution and take away our
rights," Fertik said.


Support for Clinton Impeachment Was Much Lower

In August and September of 1998, 16 major polls asked about impeaching
President Clinton
(http://democrats.com/clinton-impeachment-polls). Only 36% supported hearings
to consider
impeachment, and only 26% supported actual impeachment and removal. Even so,
the impeachment
debate dominated the news for months, and the Republican Congress impeached
Clinton despite
overwhelming public opposition.


Passion for Impeachment is Major Unreported Story

The strong support for impeachment found in this poll is especially
surprising because the views
of impeachment supporters are entirely absent from the broadcast and print
media, and can only
be found on the Internet and in street protests. The lack of coverage of
impeachment support is
due in part to the fact that not a single Democrat in Congress has called for
impeachment,
despite considerable grassroots activism by groups like Democrats.com
(http://democrats.com/impeach).


Footnotes:

1. AfterDowningStreet.org is a rapidly growing coalition of veterans' groups,
peace groups, and
political activist groups that was created on May 26, 2005, following the
publication of the
Downing Street Memo in London's Sunday Times on May 1. The coalition is
urging Congress to begin
a formal investigation into whether President Bush committed impeachable
offenses in connection
with the Iraq war.

2. The Ipsos Public Affairs poll and the new Zogby poll results cited above
refer to surveys of
U.S. adults. The June 2005 Zogby results are from a survey of likely voters.
The new Zogby poll
produced results for both adults and likely voters:
1/06 Zogby: Adults and Likely Voters
11/05 Zogby: Adults and Likely Voters.
10/05 Ipsos: Adults and definitions of regions.
6/05 Zogby: Likely Voters.

3. The original impeachment question was written by Zogby for their own poll
in June 2005.
Subsequent questions were written jointly by AfterDowningStreet.org and the
pollsters. Obviously
there are many ways to word polling questions, and wording has an effect on
the results. The
range of possible questions can be seen in the 1998 polls on impeaching
President Clinton. That
is why, in July 2005, we began asking the Corporate Media pollsters to
conduct their own polls,
using their own wording. We also support the efforts of MyDD's Chris Bowers
to conduct an
in-depth poll on impeachment, which should be completed soon.

More on polling:
http://www.afterdowningstreet/polling