The public outcry, building slowly at first as the American kneepad press tries to bury the Downing Street memo, becomes an exponentially swelling tidal wave of rage. The people begin assembling in mass demonstrations to bring Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, et. al. down. Then there comes impeachment proceedings after the Democrats retake the House and the Senate in 2006. Bush, true to form, stonewalls everything, but is quickly removed from office, turned out by the Secret Service into the arms of federal marshalls who put him and his cohorts in orange jumpsuits and keep them in a special suite at Guantanamo Bay as the Internation Criminal Court in the Hague gets its apparatus in motion for the tribunal on war crimes. So sudden is Bush's fall from power, and so devastating and irrefutable is the evidence against him that the ICC has to rush to meet the demand for indictments.
The trickle of leaks soon becomes a relentless flood once prosecutors begin indicting individuals involved in the Bush administration lies, coverups, distortions of policy and other outrages, and the once hairy-chested macho posing of the Republicans turns into the belly-up, bug-eyed pleading of a bested cur, ready to comply with any order, eager to turn in anyone who could lead to a plea bargain.
Threaded together with lies and hubris, the right-wing hate machine comes apart astonishingly fast. A number of suicides plagued the former administration as apparently some shred of honor remains among a few despite the systematic attempts to expunge it. Finally, the hundred or so former officials to be indicted in the Hague are all placed on suicide watch, because the public demand for justice requires them to face their accusers and accept the blame and shame for the disasters they have caused.
Meanwhile, a constitutional crisis looms as the massive changes in the executive branch challenge the rules of presidential succession, but so great is the relief to have removed a corrupt regime that politics is rendered to the margins as the sobering effect of the people's uprising against the government shocks the remaining politicians into a mode of civic statesmanship tempered with large shakes of self-preservation. A glorious time.
And then I had to wake up and read the newspaper. Still, dreams can come true.
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