IMPEACHMENT

You may not remember the Watergate hearings. I do. I was living in Boston , and reading the Boston Globe every day to see what had happened in yesterday's testimony.

I didn't believe Nixon had been involved. His wacko right wing Attorney General, John Mitchell, had resigned that position to head up Nixon's re-election campaign committee. I assumed Mitchell had been the one to screw things up.

In fact, I was wrong. Years later, Jeb Macgruder admitted that Nixon had directly ordered the Watergate breakin to plant bugs in the Democratic Campaign Headquarters.

But at the time, people thought Nixon was too smart to do anything so astonishingly stupid. In fact, after the breakin in June 1972 We the People of the United States went on to re-elect Richard Nixon in November. The losing candidate, George McGovern, was so completely disgusted that he arranged to be out of the country on Inauguration Day, rather than be obligated to attend the ceremony.

But still, there had been a crime committed, and the persons apprehended were saying that they had been acting with Executive Authority. So a few individuals in the press, and one or two inside sources, kept digging and giving additional information to the public.

After a while, the Congress felt pressured to open investigations. They were obviously scared to death. But they called people in and asked questions. Bob Haldeman and John Erlichmann - top Nixon staffers - practically laughed in their faces. They said they didn't remember anything; they said the reports in the press were totally wrong. Nothing was going anywhere with the hearings. Then somehow a low level guy named Alexander Butterfield mentioned that Nixon was taping all his Oval Office conversations to help in writing his memoirs. These tapes were subpoenaed. Nixon said, no, they belong to me. A federal judge said the Congressional subpoena for investigation of a criminal offense was valid. Things started to crumble. Eventually, the combination of truth and open testimony from John Dean and others forced the Congress to bring impeachment proceedings against Nixon. He resigned.

Today, we are in worse circumstances. We're not talking about planting a bug in the Democrat's campaign offices. We're talking about massive, illegal bugging of conversations of ordinary American citizens. And dirty tricks? Try torturing prisoners to death, in hidden torture camps, kept away from the American public, the Red Cross, and the Geneva Convention. And financial corruption on a grandiose scale, billions of tax dollars stolen.

It's too soon to talk of Impeachment, just as June 1972 was too soon to get rid of Richard Nixon.

But let the Democratic Congress start investigating the criminal actions of the Bush Administration over the last few years. The Bushies have acted as though they were completely unaccountable to anyone, for anything. As long as they had a boot licking Republican Congress, that may have been true. But it doesn't have to be true any more.

Let the Democrats start doing their duty and enforcing some level of oversight over the conduct of the Bush Administration. Let them start investigations of a few of the smelliest and most repulsive of the Republican crimes over the past few years.

When the facts start coming out, when the American people start hearing how they have been betrayed, that's when there will be a natural and obvious course of action.

Impeachment.