Well, it seemed bound to happen eventually. Politicians have officially transitioned from YouTube campaign speeches to YouTube soapboxes – sorry, Microsoft owns Soapbox, it’ll have to called something else.
Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is the latest US Congressman/presidential candidate to take his message to YouTube. Only this is isn’t a plea to “chat” or to vote for him in 2008, it’s a call for Americans to get behind impeachment of George W. Bush.
That major candidates were utilizing YouTube as a campaign stop was one thing, but when Congressmen begin urging radical, national upheaval there, you know the website has officially arrived. (By the way, who’s going to succeed him if this happens? Cheney? Pelosi? Nice to see we have good substitutes – not.)
Kucinich first used the word “impeach” in Congress last week, and justified it as a preemptive strike against the President to deter impending war with Iran. Kucinich believes impeachment is the only way to prevent the Bush administration from attacking Iraq’s controversial (and suicidal) neighbor.
The Ohio Democrat wasn’t satisfied with the idea’s reception in Congress, so he took it to the Web community in video form and titled his message “Impeachment: I’m asking you. Do you think it’s time?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAIJyKhJhiM
“This really calls for a new thinking,” he said. “It calls for us to reconsider very deeply the moment that we’re in — where our Constitution is being trashed, where international law is being violated, where our hopes and dreams for the education of our children, for the health of our people, for housing, for our veterans are being set aside as we go deeper and deeper into war.
We need a whole discussion in America. And with your help, we’re about to have one.”
He goes on in his YouTube Address to say Iran has no ability to attack, urging Americans to “stand on behalf of peace,” and that “America was never meant to be a nation forever on the warpath.”
It will be interesting to see how many Washington politicians start using YouTube as a political soapbox, or to see whether it becomes the norm in a few years. I can see it now: 500 plus talking heads jabbering across the tubes at each other just the way they do on C-Span, the hot air increasing exponentially until the whole system of tubes explodes like the Hindenburg.
