(As printed in the Fairfield Weekly, August 16, 2007)
Members of the Weston, Westport and Stamford Impeachment Committees gathered on Thursday to call for Bush and Cheney's head in front of Stamford's Il Falco restaurant.
Inside, House Speaker and impeachment-opposer Nancy Pelosi was in attendance for a Chris Murphy fund-raiser; according to those leaving the lunch, Pelosi spoke about uniting the Democrats and ending the War in Iraq, and mentioned nothing about impeachment.
The protesters were itching to get the message across to anyone who'd listen. Richard Duffee, a retired lawyer and spokesman for the trio of local impeachment committees, wrote a letter he wanted to give to Pelosi with a petition signed by 650 pro-impeachment locals. His letter refers to the pair as as "domestic enemies of the Constitution" with "no signs of reforming themselves."
"[w]e can't get our troops out of Iraq without impeachment," he said, "because Bush and Cheney are too intimidating in Washington and they're too unresponsive."
Duffee had a message, a big bushy beard and in his hands, a copy of the Constitution printed on parchment. He spoke of hypocrisy in the government and referenced the Geneva Convention and the Nuremburg Laws as evidence of the need to remove Bush from his post. "It's standard Fascist stuff," he claimed.
Sal Liccione, a friend of Murphy's and head of Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign in the state, was able to hand the letter to Rep. Murphy inside the restaurant. "If you can't listen to grass-roots messages like this," he said, "then what can you do?"
Liccione said 57 percent of Americans want to impeach Bush and he reported that 18 members of the House (but not Murphy) have already signed Kucinich's House Resolution 333, which on Congress to impeach Bush-Cheney.
A teenaged boy walked by; one of the older protesters asked him if he liked the Rolling Stones (the boy was wearing a Stones t-shirt). He said yes, and kept walking.
"What about Bush?" someone yelled.
"I hate him!" the boy yelled back.
A sigh of generational relief. "Looks like we've got the upper-middle class vote," said John Iles, 71, of Redding.
"I'm just sick of this whole damn thing," Mary Maynard said with a laugh. She was holding a sign that simply said Enough. She was waving, smiling and throwing out thumbs-up to every car that drove by, hoping for some feedback. Many passersby ignored all attempts at eye-contact, but most waved or threw back a thumbs-up. There were honking cars, honking buses and clapping families across the street.
Among the anti-impeachers who came by was Gregory Lodato, a thirtysomething Republican member of the Stamford Board of Representatives, who said, "The debate has gotten too polarized and now people want to impeach. It's ridiculous."
Once the protesters heard of his he support for the war, they jumped all over him, calling him un-American. In response, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Lodato told the crowd that he was Native American. The crowd asked what tribe he was from; he laughed the question off. "Look up the word 'native' in the dictionary," he said. A long, polarized argument about heritage and ancestry followed until someone said, "you're all missing the point." Lodato agreed and eventually said, "It is not our place to be telling the Speaker of the House to do her job."
At one point the wonderfully Italian owner of Il Falco, Vincenzo Cordaro, stepped out to greet the crowd and he happily shared his views. "I don't think we can impeach him today," he said with a laugh, "but I think this is great. This is a great country."
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