Monica, Schmawnica. For all of the media and punditling yapping about Starr, Lewinsky, Tripp, and the whole interminable, dreary affair--make that affairs--there has been curiously little attention paid to the real question driving all the attention, namely, Will This Bring Down Bill Clinton? Or, more directly, since as a second-term prez in good health there's only one way out: Will He Be Impeached?

A press corps must be either pretty cynical or pretty desperate for audience, or both, to believe that when push comes to shove the word of a young intern--even one from a "good family"--who has already perjured herself is going to be believed by the U.S. Senate over the Commander-in- Chief. Anita Hill had much better credentials than Lewinsky, and look how far she got with that crowd.

But despair not, o pundits and teleprompter readers! There are far better reasons to impeach Bill Clinton. Lots of reasons. More than we have room for. However, for your convenience, 16 initial ones are listed forthwith as suggested Articles of Impeachment. Please spend the next 496 days talking incessantly about them--and digging up more. Call me if you need ideas.

Bill Clinton lied to the American people. Okay, so we're not a grand jury, but this ought to be a crime, and Clinton lies virtually every time he speaks. He lies when he says he cares about us, when his actions show plainly that he cares only about his own political fortune and the profit potential of his political patrons. He lies when he says his policies help the average U.S. citizen. He lies when he says the U.S. is a beacon of democracy at home and abroad. He lies when he says he likes his dog.

Bill Clinton has sold stolen goods. The stolen goods, in this case, originally belonged to the public. Bill Clinton sold them in exchange for political support and for party and campaign donations by major corporations. Lost goods include vast swaths of irreplaceable, clearcut forest (c.f. "salvage logging rider"); minerals sold for fractions of a penny on the dollar; Western rangeland ruined by ludicrously low grazing fees for a ranching industry grotesquely subsidized by taxpayers; and public airwaves worth billions of dollars, given away free to the nation's very largest telecommunications giants at the expense of a diverse media and freedom of speech.

Bill Clinton has leveled false charges of criminal activity. He has worked hard to demonize the nation's youth (a constituency that doesn't vote), endorsing teen curfews, expanding federal penalties for juvenile offenses, and supporting the exploitation of teen labor at subminimum wages. He has set the tone for an era in which the very concept of public education is under unprecedented attack, and higher education has become a luxury available to the few. His wife's craven exploitation of "kids" as needing more discipline from "the village" came at the same time that his abolition of welfare threw some two million additional youth into poverty.

Bill Clinton has stolen from future generations. In countless areas--the underfunding and increasing inaccessibility of education, the desire to gamble with privatized Social Security funds, the loss of irreplacable environmental habitat and species, to name a few--Clinton has stolen assets that rightfully belong to our children. His replacement gifts, like more nuclear waste and ozone depletion, aren't much better.

Bill Clinton's inaction has contributed to the death of thousands, particularly the young, the elderly, and the infirm. To fail to prevent an imminent crime, when one has the power to do so, is also a crime. There can be no more apt description of Bill Clinton's oversight of the collapse of America's health care delivery system. While for-profit insurance companies, hospitals, drug companies, HMOs, and assorted other parasites generate the world's highest per-capita health care costs, many U.S. citizens find themselves unable to get the treatment, doctor, drugs, insurance, or compassion they want and/or need--a situation that simply didn't exist in 1992. Since handing off to Hillary a half-assed paean to big insurance companies (misnamed "health care reform") in 1993, Clinton has done nothing while the crisis worsens and people die unnecessarily in the world's richest country.

Bill Clinton has repeatedly and willfully violated the constitutional separation of powers. Clinton's federal court appointments have been highly political in nature, leaning heavily toward both satisfying reactionary congressional critics like Orrin Hatch and furthering Clinton's economic agenda. While using abortion as a convenient, non-economic "litmus test" to satisfy liberals, Clinton has packed the courts, including his Supreme Court appointments, for six years with judges known to be hostile to personal rights and friendly to corporate rights. The result is that far from countering the damage of the Reagan/Bush years, Bill has solidified the practice of court appointments as a political exercise and the reality of a federal judicial system that is, after a full generation of conservative appointees, deeply reactionary. Meanwhile, Clinton also pushed through Congress and signed a bill giving him line-item veto power. The recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, that the law was unconstitutional, did not void Clinton's use of an unconstitutional law for over a year to trump congressional authority to allocate tax dollars.

Bill Clinton has done more than any peacetime President in U.S. history to undermine the Bill of Rights. His repeated, dramatic expansion of government and police powers to seize evidence, coerce testimony, wiretap and spy on innocent civilians, deny habeas corpus and other basic legal rights for the accused, and require mandatory sentences should terrify any citizen. Clinton's dramatic expansion of INS powers, militarization of the Mexican border, and denial of basic rights for immigrants are intended, quite simply, to exempt whole classes of people from the protection offered in this country by the Constitution. The dramatic expansion of U.S. prison populations, especially for nonviolent offenders, is a human rights debacle, as is U.S. detention of political prisoners and the escalating use of torture in federal and state prison control units.

Bill Clinton is a global bully. In countless forums, the U.S. under Clinton has gone against international consensus and attempted through a mixture of threats, bribery, and general pigheadedness to prevent global cooperation. Examples include stonewalling on environmental, global warning and ozone depletion, nuclear non-proliferation, war crimes, and landmine ban agreements; still-delinquent U.S. dues to the United Nations; insistence on "free" trade mechanisms such as the WTO and MAI, and IMF- sponsored domestic austerity programs that have brought widespread misery in dozens of countries; and defiance of international desires for less confrontational policies with Iran, Iraq, and Cuba, and more confrontational policies with Israel, Indonesia, Nigeria, and the usual assortment of U.S.-backed kleptocracies.

Bill Clinton issues repeated threats to kill people. In fact, these threats comprise a huge, and once again increasing, part of the federal budget, the part devoted to our post-Cold War military. And in this era where the U.S. simply has no credible dangers to its territorial security, Clinton's primary reason for military spending--to direct tax dollars to economic elites--shouldn't mask the current use of the military itself, to provide a physical threat when Bill's bullying isn't getting the intended results through economic pressure. Clinton's escalation of military spending, particularly on fancy, exorbitant weapons systems--while closing bases and slashing enlistment jobs--has, for the past several years running, exceeded the already high amount requested by the Pentagon.

Bill Clinton has provided weapons to known felons. Never before in U.S. history has any president pushed so vigorously to arm the world against itself. The U.S. is now responsible for perhaps 70% of the world's death-dealing (up from about 30% in 1990), and regularly arms both sides in a conflict and parties known to abuse human rights. Clinton's drive to, for example, lift limits on arms sales to Latin American regimes, export military technology to China, and use third parties to get weapons into the hands of parties he's barred from selling to directly (e.g., Bosnia) has been unconscionable. Around the world, a country once held as a democratic ideal is now known primarily as an exporter of world-class firepower to criminal regimes.

Bill Clinton is guilty of attempted murder. Clinton signed the first law in U.S. history, as part of the War On Drugs (sic), that allows capital punishment for federal crimes other than murder or treason. He also greatly expanded the number of types of federal crime eligible for capital status. As someone who has, in the past, already murdered (signing a retarded Arkansas prisoner's death warrant in 1992 for political advantage over widespread protest), Clinton should be considered a possible repeat offender and a particular menace. As previous Articles show, his eagerness to have his government decide who lives or dies is nearly sociopathic and extremely dangerous.

Bill Clinton is guilty of fraud. He took enormous sums of money from organized labor and then, contrary to his promises, did nothing for it. Quite the opposite: Clinton's advocacy of "free" trade, NAFTA and a hemispheric NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, and countless other mechanisms allows transnational corporations unprecedented leverage over working people on a global scale. Labor, faced with Clinton's support for anti-union regimes abroad and laws heavily stacked against collective bargaining at home, has been reduced to being happy Clinton didn't intervene in the UPS and G.M. strikes. Labor should get its money back. When a crime is committed, however, refunding the stolen money doesn't get the perp off the hook.

Bill Clinton is guilty of impersonating Marie Antoinette. Clinton's "let them eat cake" mantra, coated with a thin veneer of "rising tides lift all boats" slime and splattered with trickle-down Reaganomics stain, cannot mask a simple fact: despite the recent recovery of a bit of the lower and middle classes' lost wages, the continuing acceleration in income disparity between the richest and poorest peoples in the U.S. is basic to every economic policy of Bill Clinton. The richest one percent of Americans now own more than the "bottom" ninety percent; CEOs make over 200 times the income of their average employees, a ratio that has tripled in recent years; corporate taxation, and taxation of the highest levels of personal income, is by far the lowest of any Western democracy. These elites are the people who make Bill Clinton possible. Clinton's economic policies have succeeded magnificently: they are designed to ensure that the vast majority of people do not share in the wealth generated by the global economy. Marie was impeached, too.

Bill Clinton is guilty of robbery. A tax system in which all contribute a share of their labor and wealth to finance projects for the common good is called government. A tax system in which money is forcibly extorted from the lower and middle classes to further enrich the richest classes renders its chief executive a criminal.

Bill Clinton has sold his constituents down the river. A direct violation of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, prohibiting trafficking in human beings. The vast majority of the people supporting Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 have had their interests betrayed.

Bill Clinton has sold himself. Also a violation of the 14th Amendment, or perhaps prostitution statutes. Chances are good Clinton has also violated campaign finance laws, in much the same sense that one gets sand between one's toes while running on the beach. Lucky thing the Lincoln Bedroom is vacuumed regularly.

Should impeachment proceed, activists should take a tip from the Nixon experience. Al Gore is guilty of all of these crimes--often to a greater degree than Bill, as he's out of the public eye. Like Agnew, Gore should be thrown out first. Sure, it means that the third in succession would become President Gingrich. But he wouldn't stand a chance in hell in 2000, and in the meantime, at least the gliberals would pay attention to whatever scams were being attempted.

Ultimately, of course, the circus surrounding the desire to impeach Bill Clinton is merely a diversion, a pleasant daydream for the masses. Wall Street will never let it happen; more importantly, Bill Clinton is not the problem. The problem is an electoral system that only allows people like him to ascend to high political office in the first place.

Nonetheless, these 16 Articles each deserve far more media scrutiny than Clinton's libido deserves. More late-breaking developments at eleven. Back to you! Kenneth?