The problem goes much deeper than President George Bush and his cohorts. But impeachment and the related hearings would help expose and slow this country’s sad and steady descent into a pseudo-religious, globalized, anti-democratic corporate/military police state; an American Fascism. Former President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sexual relations with a White House staffer. President George Bush should be impeached for:

1) Lying this country into starting an unnecessary, illegal and lost imperial war of aggression and occupation. A war that is tearing Iraq apart, an occupation that is traumatizing, mutilating, and killing tens of thousands, a brutal and spectacularly ill-planned jack move, for oil and global position that’s wasting over $8 billion a month in taxpayers’ dollars; dollars that could be used to help provide health care, education, small business loans, jobs and job training for the millions of working people who built this country.

2) Authorizing acts defined as war crimes by the Geneva Conventions, including: the illegal detention, torture and murder of civilians and prisoners of war in both well known and secret American gulags, and the use of, the chemical weapon of mass destruction, white phosphorous.

3) Acting with extreme disregard for the First and Fourth Amendments by implementing the illegal and warrantless covert monitoring of millions of law abiding US citizens’ phone calls, postal mail, e-mails, and financial transactions. Then once caught, lying about the true nature, role and scope of secret police activity in this country, all the while questioning the patriotism of his critics.

4) Collaborating in the criminal manipulation and suppression of the Black and Democratic vote in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004. These blatant violations of the Voting Rights Act enabled the coup-like theft of two consecutive Presidential elections.

5) Overseeing a rampaging anti-democratic foreign policy, which has included: invading and occupying Iraq, overthrowing the elected progressive government of Haiti, backing the attempted toppling of the elected revolutionary government of Venezuela, meddling in the national elections of Nicaragua, Bolivia, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Costa Rica, instigating war in the Horn of Africa and planning an attack on Iran.

6) Performing in a sickeningly slow, inept and deadly fashion in response to Hurricane Katrina and its on-going aftermath. While the poorest of the poor lay dying, Bush, who has proven to be as stubborn as he is dim, took time to strum a guitar. Distant from reality, the Emperor posed for photo-ops while standing naked before the world.

7) Committing numerous other acts suggesting that he and the arrogant, secretive, greedy and indictable Chaney-led junta, which speaks through him, are somehow above the law, somehow above the will of the people, somehow above the Constitution.

Editor’s Note: Lloyd Daniel is a writer, an educator, and a former member of Missouri’s House of Representatives. His website address is www.lloyddaniel.info