Early summer has brought a flurry of public discussion about a topic previously confined to political margins -- the possibility of impeaching President George W. Bush. The idea is still far from the national media echo chamber, but some rumblings are now audible as people begin to think about the almost unthinkable.

A few generations of Americans are apt to view impeachment as an extreme step. One factor has been John F. Kennedy's widely read 1956 book "Profiles in Courage," which captured a Pulitzer Prize. The book devoted a chapter to lauding Sen. Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, whose "not guilty" vote prevented the Senate from convicting an impeached president, Andrew Johnson, on May 26, 1868.

In real life, Ross -- who promptly put the squeeze on President Johnson for a series of patronage appointments -- was hardly the idealist that Kennedy's book cracked him up to be. But the chapter's melodrama popularized a negative image of impeachment.

That outlook was especially strong for nearly 20 years, until a few of President Richard Nixon's lies caught up with him. During

            AUSTIN, Texas -- My, my, my, the great Iraqi Gold Rush is on, and who should be there at the front of the line, right along with Halliburton and Bechtel, but our old friends at WorldCom, perpetrator of the largest accounting fraud in American history.

            WorldCom, shortly to become MCI, has been given a contract worth $45 million in the short term to build a wireless phone network in Iraq. I learned via The Associated Press that Washington Technology, a trade newspaper that follows computing-related sales to the U.S. government, "found WorldCom jumped to eighth among all federal technology contractors in 2002, with $772 million in government sales." And that is only counting the deals in which WorldCom is the primary contractor. It is actually getting much more as a subcontractor.

            The Securities and Exchange Commission recently reached a settlement with WorldCom, fining the company $500 million for its $11 billion defrauding of investors. The company did not have to admit any guilt. "The $500 million is in a sense laundered by the taxpayers," Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, told AP.

Asked to a recent wedding in Virginia, the proud parents asked if I would do some sort of officiation. It would be my second inning in this role, having acted as priest/judge at a rural splicing here in the North California backwoods some years ago. On that occasion I wrote up a laicized version of the wedding ritual in the 16th-century "Book of Common Prayer," shorn, of course, of the bit of her obeying him. Then the couple nipped into a back room where there was a real judge on hand to make it legal.

            This time, beside a pond in a green field in rural Virginia, there was no judge, but none was necessary since the couple had already eloped back in January, getting married on the bus the bridegroom's film collective uses on their cinematic ventures.

            Why, you ask, would anyone ask a raffish antinomian of Sixties vintage to preside at any ceremony beyond the increasingly familiar occupation of helping throw the ashes of some deceased lefty comrade over the back of a boat or off the top of a mountain? Maybe it's all those years on the road, giving booster talks to radical groups, raising money for all

AUSTIN, Texas -- Watching some dipstick the other day on Fox News carry on with great certainty about Hillary Clinton and her evil motives -- and I don't think this guy actually spends a lot of time tete a tete with Mrs. Clinton while she reveals her deepest thoughts to him -- I wondered, "Lord, when are these people going to get over it?"

            I think the answer is never, because most people have a very hard time forgiving those whom they have deeply wronged. I know that's sort of counterintuitive, but think about some of the bad divorces you have known. When we have done something terrible to someone, we often need to twist it around so it's their fault, not ours.

            So we continue to suffer this deformity in our public life because of what Sid Blumenthal calls "this perverse episode," the scoundrel time.

            Just last week, The Wall Street Journal, reminded of the Vince Foster suicide by Mrs. Clinton's new memoir, "Living History," wrote a nasty, callous, defensive editorial. It's a classic of the genre of exculpating yourself by blaming others. Since Foster named The Wall Street

In a democracy, leaders must earn and retain the public's trust. No matter how loudly those leaders proclaim their dedication to fighting terrorism, we must not flinch from examining whether they are trustworthy.

On March 17, 2003, in a major address to the American people, President George W. Bush declared: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." On April 10, in a televised message to the people of Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair said: "We did not want this war. But in refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam gave us no choice but to act."

Before and during the war on Iraq, we heard many other such statements from top officials in Washington and London. Ostensibly they justified the war.

Among the horrors of that war are weapons known as cluster bombs. I use the present tense because now -- months after the Pentagon and the British military dropped thousands of cluster bombs on Iraq -- they continue to explode, sometimes in the hands of children who