The movement to impeach President Bush is gaining momentum, according to US Liberals Guide Deborah White. An early December Rasmussen Reports survey suggested about one-third of Americans would support impeachment, and that was before revelations of domestic wiretaps without warrant. Christmas Eve revelations related to this include news that the Administration has monitored Muslim mosques and homes for abnormal levels of radiation since 2002 - without warrants or court orders - and NSA has also obtained back-door access to domestic and international telecommunications - voice and internet traffic - as part of the warrentless-domestic wiretapping scheme:

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks... The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches...

The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.

Writing for MSNBC last week, Howard Fineman predicts:

As best I can tell -- and this really isn't my beat -- the only people who knew about the NSA's new (and now so controversial) warrant-less eavesdropping program early on were Bush, Cheney, NSA chief Michael Hayden, his top deputies, top leaders of the CIA, and lawyers at the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office hurriedly called in to sprinkle holy water on it.

Which presents the disturbing image of the White House as a series of nesting dolls, with Cheney-Bush at the tiny secret center, sifting information that most of the rest of the people around them didn't even know existed. And that image, in turn, will dominate and define the year 2006 -- and, I predict, make it the angriest, most divisive season of political theater since the days of Richard Nixon.

We are entering a dark time in which the central argument advanced by each party is going to involve accusing the other party of committing what amounts to treason. Democrats will accuse the Bush administration of destroying the Constitution; Republicans will accuse the Dems of destroying our security.

Andy Ostroy provides perspective, reminding readers of the events of late 1998:

[A] highly partisan U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Bill Clinton, making him just the second U.S. president in history to be impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868 following the Civil War. Clinton's offense? Lying under oath about his unimpressive high-school-quality sexual dalliances with intern Monica Lewinsky. Pretty tame stuff, and not quite a threat to anyone or anything except a flimsy red dress and a Rhodes Scholar's dignity.

And AmericanBlog wonders why talk radio dismisses current revelations as maybe "violat[ing] a law."

There are several websites devoted to impeachment, including ImpeachBush.org, ImpeachBush.tv, ImpeachBushNow.org, The Four Reasons of Responsible Citizenship. Citizens who wish to meet like-minded neighbors can turn to ImpeachBush.Meetup.Com.

Blogs covering this issue: The Conservative Voice, Eva Marie's Blog, Hammer of Truth, Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Necropolitan Times, Slashdot, Letters to the editor: Shout ‘impeach Bush' From The Rooftops (The Day, New London, CT) ; Impeach Bush (Philadelphia Daily News).

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