Yet it's precisely because I don't want the faith-based approach to be a cover for the wholesale abandonment of government's responsibilities that I share the dismay of the religious who wrote to Bush. Millions of working people are poor--and lack health insurance and adequate child care--even though they do all the things that society and our religious traditions say they should. Religious groups will never have the money to transform the material conditions of these families. But relatively modest government outlays could make their lives much better.

There is a religious mandate for such an approach. “Jewish prophets and Catholic teaching both speak of God's special concern for the poor. This is perhaps the most radical teaching of faith, that the value of life is not contingent on wealth or strength or skill, that value is a reflection of God's image.”

Those thoughtful words are George W. Bush's. Is it too much to ask him to explain how his policies live up to that vision?

For months, various mostly liberal and progressive critics of Bush have been whipping up impeachment calls on the Internet. Such calls have been delusional, boiling down, essentially, to the fact that Bush's critics hate a number of his policies. But there are no pending or existing indictments; no evidence of criminal wrongdoing; and no conceivable political route by which the votes for impeachment could be mustered by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and upheld by two-thirds of a Republican-controlled Senate. Critics may charge that Dubya's administration has been appallingly corrupt, or that it is gutting the Bill of Rights; but so far the corruption has been legal, and conservative federal courts have mostly upheld post-9/11 civil liberties atrocities. George W. Bush has inspired remarkable amounts of hatred amongst many of his critics; but that alone doesn't make impeachment legally viable or politically sustainable. It has been a non-starter.

Until now.

If proven -- and they can, in fact, be proven as such -- the Bush Administration's lies to the United Nations, to the American people, and to Congress in last October's effort to win authority to invade, all constitute an either unwitting or witting effort to put American soldiers in harm's way, guaranteeing the deaths of some. America's military was deployed for reasons Bush and his entire foreign policy apparatus either knew or should have known were fallacious.

A strange feeling overtakes the British journalist in Washington these days, as he chronicles the rebirth of the imperial presidency under George Bush, and then turns for a second to CNN, to watch Tony Blair defending himself at Prime Minister’s Questions. Mere theatrics, I tell myself as I watch the heated exchanges. Entertaining to be sure, but only a charade that passes for open government, where questioning by the people’s elected representatives elicits few facts and certainly changes no policies.

Like many others in my trade, I was brought up to believe in the superiority of the American system, with its vaunted checks and balances. A Congress with powerful investigative committees and a press unhampered by restrictive libel laws and a stifling Official Secrets Act — that, not a weekly bun fight in the Commons, was what was needed to hold the country’s rulers accountable. Or is it? What is so striking in America right now is the absence of accountability. The administration has led the country into an unprovoked war against a sovereign foreign state for reasons that were certainly overstated and quite possibly deliberately mendacious. It has mistreated detainees after Sept. 11 with a disregard for basic civil rights that worries the inspector general of Bush’s own Justice Department. But look not to Capitol Hill for remedies.

Those committees, with their sweeping subpoena powers? As they say in polite New York circles, “fuggeddaboutit”. First of all, the Republicans who control the White House also have majorities in both chambers of Congress — and thus in the committees of Congress. If push comes to shove, Republican senators and congressmen will make sure that no great embarrassment befalls a popular Republican president and his senior officials. And these latter know it.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deals with questions in the manner of an aged bull, idly swatting away flies with his tail on a warm summer day. Or take John Ashcroft, the attorney general, who on the very day the inspector general’s report appeared, breezily informed the House Judiciary Committee that he wanted even more draconian powers to fight terrorism. A Justice Department spokesman commented, apropos of the report, “We make no apologies for using every legal measure to protect the security of the American people.” There you have it: National security, in whose name all is permitted, nothing has to be explained, and no one need provide a serious account of their behavior.

From my e-mail, I gather that many of my correspondents believe that illegal immigrants -- by virtue of being illegal -- have no rights, no protections, and no cause to complain when they are mistreated. And that this is true under the best of circumstances. When there is the possibility that the immigrants can be linked to terrorism -- or when they at least come from countries known to produce terrorists -- well, all bets are off.

If this sounds OK with you, there could be a career waiting for you at the Justice Department. Over there, the motto seems to be: "Just do it. Justify it later. And if later comes, and what you did can't be justified, deny, deny, deny.''

You needn't go that far. In this -- law enforcement's carte blanche era -- whatever you do and whoever suffers, you can simply say that terrorism made you do it, and that extreme times call for extreme measures. Or you can contend that some trampled civil liberties are a small price for preventing terrorist attacks -- especially if the liberties underfoot belong to someone else.

Go ahead, connect the dots on Ashcroft yourself. A cavalier attitude toward civil liberties, an inability to concede mistakes, a refusal to see imperfections in the criminal justice system, a zealously irrational belief in the death penalty -- and pretty soon you can read between the lines of that Justice Department report: The attorney general is far more dangerous than any of the immigrants he wrongly detained.

America is now faced with a choice: do we want to go the way of the empire building neoconservatives or not? You are either a PNAC-worshipping, Rumsfeld-loving, Wolfowitz-adoring neoconservative or you are a true American. You cannot be both. So which is it, ladies and gentlemen? Will you stand up and fight against President Bush come 2004, or will you stand idly by and allow him to drag this country further into war and empire for another four years? The choice is yours, and yours alone.

>Recently, a group of Harvard University students uncovered further Harken outrages, which they deemed "certainly more significant than Whitewater," but few newspapers picked up on the story, and those that did, like the Wall Street Journal, downplayed Bush's role. "I think a big part of the story is a fear mainstream reporters have to deal with the consequences of information that would undermine their own current worldview about the president," Ian Simmons, Director Of The Citizen Research Network At Harvard University said. "If the story had the implication the president had been lying to the American people, it's a story that the mainstream reporters are not prepared to handle very well, I think. And in many cases, if they ran a story like that they would get ostracized by the White House." [LINK] Or, of course, they'd be ridiculed as "conspiracy theorists" by the so-called liberal media.

...

So while John Dean mulls over whether or not Bush should be impeached [LINK], many are either unaware or unconcerned about a multitude of Bush sins. If polls are to be believed, most Americans don't care that he lied. It's not as if he misled us about something really serious, like sex with an intern, for God's sake. At this point, Dan Rather could report outright that thanks to Bush administration stonewalling, victims' families will never get a serious investigation into September 11; that John Ashcroft hopes to declare the Bill of Rights null and void; that the Iraq war has been planned since 1992; that many in the Bush administration are reaping huge profits from forever war; and that the White House tried to hide Halliburton's $7 billion in no-bid contracts and many Americans would shrug and wait for the next American Idol.

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology," author Michael Parenti wrote. It's all part of the duping of America, which has escalated steadily since November 2000, thanks to Katherine Harris, Database Technologies and the wind beneath Enron and Halliburton's wings [LINK]. While some have suggested that the government was willfully negligent before the September 11 attacks [LINK] and ex-CIA officials wonder if the Bush administration will plant WMDs in Iraq, [LINK], the truth is that Americans are rarely told the truth. [LINK]

John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General and official anti-terrorism butthead, says that, rumors to the contrary, he does too support the Bill of Rights -- because it's cheaper:

"There's no interest whatsoever that the United States of America has in holding innocent people, absolutely none. It's costly. It takes up resources that makes it difficult for us to do what we need to do with other people who are threats ."

Such an eloquent defense of liberty I have never heard.

Unfortunately, some of Ashcroft subordinates aren't quite as cost conscious as the AG. A recent report by the Justice Department's Inspector General found that guards at several federal correctional facilities wasted valuable government time beating and torturing some of the hundreds of terrorist "suspects" rounded up immediately after 9/11:

Iraq's weapons of mass destruction remain a mystery and a conundrum.  What are they, where are they, how dangerous are they?  Or were they a manufactured excuse by an Administration eager to seize a country?  It is time to answer these questions.  It is time– past time – for the Administration to level with the American people, and it is time for the President to demand an accounting from his own Administration as to exactly how our nation was led down such a twisted path to war.

One last point: the Bush administration's determination to see what it wanted to see led not just to a gross exaggeration of the threat Iraq posed, but to a severe underestimation of the problems of postwar occupation. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that occupying Iraq might require hundreds of thousands of soldiers for an extended period, Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark" — and the secretary of the Army may have been fired for backing up the general. Now a force of 150,000 is stretched thin, facing increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks, and a senior officer told The Washington Post that it might be two years before an Iraqi government takes over. The Independent reports that British military chiefs are resisting calls to send more forces, fearing being "sucked into a quagmire."

I'll tell you what's outrageous. It's not the fact that people are criticizing the administration; it's the fact that nobody is being held accountable for misleading the nation into war.