This issue's articles on Colin Powell's Iraq lies and the horrifying new Police State Enhancement Act are only two of dozens of excellent reasons why a number of activists, on the Internet and in their own communities, are talking impeachment.

Politically, of course, it's a non-starter; both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans for the next two years, and, as we saw in the Clinton years, impeachment is no longer an indictment for crimes against a president's oath of office and more. It's now reduced to a political chess move, in which, under Clinton, Republicans sacrificed a piece (the mid-term elections) and won the war. The resulting ill will toward the Clinton Administration was one of the things that cost Al Gore the 2000 election. While many Americans were enraged by the impeachment, by 2000, they'd forgotten. Conservatives hadn't, and their additional hostility toward all things tainted by Clinton made a difference in 2000.

But Republican control of both houses of Congress for the next two years--which is the rather mundane reason why impeachment will not happen--is only part of the problem. A disturbing number of Democrats, including a solid majority of the party's declared candidates to challenge Bush in 2004, are fully on board for all this, too. Forget impeachment. Let's talk treason.

Plenty of progressives snickered at last week's arrest in Spokane, Washington of a former Coast Guard officer and militia buff for spying. But ask yourself: Which is worse? Passing police plans for emergency deployment along to a bunch of self-deluded cranks in the woods? Or running roughshod over the world, planning (with glee) new Hiroshimas and the eager massacre of hundreds of thousands of people, and, at home, trashing 200+ years of liberties and individual freedoms that, to use the cliche, generations of those soldiers once fought and died for? (Back when even our wars of empire weren't launched every 18 months like new product rollouts.)

What Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and the rest of these Strangelovian zealots are doing--and don't forget their Democratic enablers--deserves far worse than impeachment. A few more all but inevitable months of unchecked abuse, and these traitors will have earned a place at the head of the list of people who have brought disgrace to the idealistic dream that was once the United States of America.

In a way, our country's long history of groundbreaking experiments in democracy and freedom are now just getting in the way. Not of the Bushies--our constitutional protections have significantly impeded their accelerated rush toward totalitarianism, though less so as time goes on. At this point, however, it's interfering more with the public's ability to recognize and stop what's happening.

Consider that we now live in a country which: imprisons over two million of its people, almost all of them from the least powerful segments of society, and many of whom are considered victims of torture by international human rights groups; has given its myriad police and military agencies unlimited authority to investigate and harass people because of their political or religious beliefs; has also given its police the right to seize and keep private property, even without any criminal conviction of the victims; has erected an entire legal system, and now a domestic "war on terror," predicated on citizens ratting each other out, justice meted out as a function of the defendant's wealth and status, and defendants usually faring far worse if they protest their innocence; has its every government pronouncement endlessly, uniformly, and uncritically parroted to a credulous public by a mass media that might as well be a state-run monopoly for all the diversity in its product; is now actively deporting or jailing indefinitely immigrants who have either been convicted of no crime, or convicted in a kangaroo court (the INS) where normal due process is stood on its head; has established that citizens, also, can be jailed indefinitely, or even executed, again with no or tainted conviction, by shunting them to the military court system; has a "President," son of a former President, who did not win election, seized power anyway, and has since moved aggressively to enhance his own power and that of his underlings; and by both example and material support is encouraging even more extreme behavior along these lines by dictators around the world, to whom our government provides money, weapons, military and secret police training, and diplomatic legitimacy.

And twenty years from now, it will be from their ranks that the next generation of Noriegas, Saddam Husseins, and Osama bin Ladens will emerge.

That's a partial list of what the Bush Administration has enacted or expanded upon in only two years. In any other country, citizens subjected to such a spectacle would have long ago recognized and named this for what it is. But because of the American mythology and iconography, the vast majority of the public looks at the world's ugliest regimes and blithely assumes that it can't happen here. Meanwhile, it's happening.

Mythology and iconography aside, there is nothing--beyond our wealth--that distinguishes the lives of Americans from people in Indonesia under Suharto, or Chile under Pinochet, or the Philippines (for 50 years, a US colony) under Marcos. Or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or Russia under Stalin, or Germany under Hitler. In all of these cases, the vast majority of people lived their lives with only a peripheral nod to the abuses of their government; politics was something people simply tried to ignore, lest they, as with an occasional neighbor, simply disappear. Mostly, it was the underclasses that disappeared--the poor, the despised religious or ethnic minority. And usually, it was done in the name of state security, as protection against an external threat; and most citizens assumed that when people disappeared, those people had done something wrong--not the government.

Invariably, with these types of regimes, the government did it all in the name of protecting the public against criminals and against enemies of the state. And most of those countries did, in fact, at least have a recent domestic history of invasions or revolutions. Most people accepted the state's predations, the Indonesians and Chileans and Filipinos and Iraqis and Russians and Germans, by and large, tried to live and work and play and eat and have sex and raise kids and mourn their dead the same as we do. We are not unique; these are all things that humans do, wherever we are born and live, with or without the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Having survived its nightmare, a number of countries, from Spain and Portugal to Chile and Argentina to South Africa to El Salvador and Guatemala, have survived their authoritarian nightmares and are now more or less indistinguishable from the rest of the global community. Their people weren't and aren't uniquely predisposed to living under totalitarianism. Neither are we.

There's nothing to prevent the United States from having its dream hijacked by a wealthy, 21st century version of the same stunning abuses of state and corporate power experienced so depressingly often in the world's history. Nothing.

And it's happening.