Given the virtually complete corruption of the American political establishment, what the United States really needs is some sort of revolution. But failing that, the question must be asked: what sort of offense would it take to impeach George Bush?

If it were 30 years ago, we'd already have one.

Finally, and far too late, the networks, the big dailies, and the national news magazines are discovering that the Bush Administration's case for invading Iraq was a combination of willfully gross exaggerations and flat-out lies.

For weeks, various recently leaked or released documents have confirmed that there was little or no evidence in American and British files that even plausibly pointed to an Iraqi threat of either nuclear or other banned weapons or an Iraqi link to Al-Qaeda, and that intelligence analysts in both governments did not believe such threats existed. Allegations of a threat only materialized when the politicians got involved.

The new documentation of hyped claims, combined with an utter lack (weather balloon trailers notwithstanding) of post-invasion evidence that such claims had any basis in fact at all, are an enormous political scandal in Britain. However, their content does little more than confirm what opponents of the proposed invasion have said since last summer: that most of the endless variety of Bush assertions "proving" either Iraqi WMDs or links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda were on their face preposterous, and that their own experts said so.

The Bush team's strategy of rapidly shifting justifications effectively deflected attention each time actual facts caught up with the rhetoric; by then, the White House was already hammering on a new reason for unprovoked war. All this has been known for months by enough people to fuel the instant birth of a massive peace movement in America and world-wide. The lack of any subsequent supporting discoveries of WMDs or terror links, with all the plausible search sites now exhausted, comes as no surprise. A stopped clock is occasionally correct, but usually it's wrong, and usually its owner knows the clock is broken.

But this wasn't a matter of reporting the time. The Bush Administration swore to Congress, America, and the world that the legal justification for invading, conquering, and occupying Iraq was based on evidence that did not in fact exist. After a full year, the Bush Administration continues to make such assertions repeatedly. This is not simply an appalling campaign of lies. It is an impeachable offense.

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 Congress.

This should be different.

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 (especially in the effort to win last October's authority to invade), all constitute either an 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.

Bush claimed as his legal authority for invasion last October's Congressional vote. On the eve of that vote, in a major speech aimed at Congress, Bush claimed that satellite photos gave irrefutable evidence that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program, and claimed--mere days after intelligence agencies put the date at 2010--that Iraq would have such weapons ready to deploy within a year. "Facing clear evidence of peril," Bush told Congress, America, and the world, "we cannot wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

All this "clear evidence" was nonsense, and plenty of the administration's own experts had told the White House it was nonsense. From August to March, Bush and his team first insisted they had evidence that did not in fact exist, and then presented evidence (such as Colin Powell's UN citations of a forged bill of sale and a plagiarized ten-year-old graduate student paper) that was patently false. Because they lied, soldiers died.

The outrage thus far is coming from the media and from the British example. With a few honorable exceptions, such as Sen. Robert Byrd and Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Henry Waxman, it is not coming from Congressional Democrats. Every major presidential candidate save Howard Dean has declined to criticize Bush on the matter. Contrast this with the Clinton impeachment, where years of fanatical attempts by Congressional Republicans and right-wing talk radio hosts to impale Slick Willie over Whitewater had resulted in a special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, whose obsessive efforts finally provided the legal pretext for the Monica Lewinsky charges.

Given the relative Democratic spinelessness, no attack on the fitness of George W. Bush and his band of neocon zealots can go anywhere without widespread public outrage, including support from independents and at least some Republicans. Corporate corruption and civil liberty attacks can't do that. Misuse of the American military can.

The unprovoked invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq should never have happened. Instead, the White House claimed that Bush spent several months allegedly agonizing over whether to launch an invasion he had already approved.

Before and after his secret decision, for at least half a year, his Administration's claims were largely false. If Bush himself didn't know that, he should have.

If he did know it, he has lied to Congress--just like Clinton--and to America and the world, but repeatedly and on a far more serious matter than the definition of "sex." Bush, instead, used his lies to intentionally sacrifice the lives of American soldiers--along with other coalition soldiers and countless Iraqis, soldier and civilian alike.

For this egregious abuse of his oath of office, George W. Bush should be impeached.

Maybe if he was discovered receiving blow jobs from military contractors...