Neil Young: Exclusive 'Impeach the President' Lyrics

Whatever would we do without FOX News? They bring us this:

Neil Young’s new album, Living with War, is an incendiary, moving, totally American document of peaceful protest that is going to make a lot of people crazy one way or another.

And there’s no doubt that the centerpiece of the album, a song called “Let’s Impeach The President,” performed as a melodic, rocking, campfire ode will be what causes the most controversy. For one thing, though Young has lived in California since the late 1960s, his nay-sayers will decry him as a Canadian. Others will call him unpatriotic or treasonous.

But there are just as many fans of Neil Young who will cite him as a political poet, a hero, and a troubadour working in the most traditional vein of American music. Certainly “Living with War” contains the most pungent attacks on a US president in pop-rock since The Ramones recorded “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg” in the late 1980s. And Young reaches back to the original rock protest singer, Bob Dylan, calling out to him in one of the songs.

But this album is no giddy hit and run. It’s far more serious and searing in its assessment of contemporary life than that, and it wouldn’t matter if it came from someone born in Kansas City or Ottawa. When Living with War starts streaming on www.neilyoung.com on Friday, my guess is the servers will overheat. The real test will come next week, when the album is available for downloading on several sites.

For now, though, here are the lyrics many parents are going to be hearing their kids singing in the next few days. Young has been clever enough to write the catchiest protest song since Country Joe and the Fish’s anti-Vietnam ditty, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die.”

Here, for the first time, the lyrics to Neil Young’s “Let’s Impeach the President”:

Let’s impeach the president for lying

And leading our country into war

Abusing all the power that we gave him

And shipping all our money out the door

He’s the man who hired all the criminals

The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors

And bend the facts to fit with their new stories

Of why we have to send our men to war

Let’s impeach the president for spying

On citizens inside their own homes

Breaking every law in the country

By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees

Would New Orleans have been safer that way

Sheltered by our government’s protection

Or was someone just not home that day?

Let’s impeach the president

For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected

Dividing our country into colors

And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he’s racking down on steroids

Since he sold his old baseball team

There’s lot of people looking at big trouble

But of course the president is clean

Thank God"-from FOX News.