March 23, 1999 -- The attempted coup against President Clinton will be looked upon as one of the saddest domestic episodes of the American Empire, an empire that began 200 years ago and -- implicit in the events of the last year -- is probably in its decline.

There are several facets to this tragic comedy, popularly entitled The Lewinsky Scandal, that correlate to the dark yet accurate vision of George Orwell's "1984." Revealed during occasional moments of this ordeal, we've seen glimpses of truth beyond the political spin; we've glimpsed the egos and the lies of hypocrites, racists, and megalomaniacs who act as our "elected representatives."

One of these truths revealed was the suppression of America's voice.

Granted, not all of our representatives are unfeeling instruments of their party, nor are all of them driven by greed or narcissism. It may well have been the few reasonable voices within our government -- such as Senators Mary Landrieu and Paul Wellstone - who aided, by contrast, a better comprehension of the insanity that overtook Republicans in Washington. In looking back on the whole so-called impeachment "process," one can't help recalling the utter frustration of a country that knew damned well who it had elected President -- but whose voice was arrogantly ignored by Congress.

From the moment that Ken Starr's pompous and ominous evidence train pulled up to the Capitol, all the way through to the final Senate vote, the "will of the people" was continuously ignored. From January 1998 to February 1999, the "GOPigs" kept up the same refrain: "we don't live by the polls" (though they may well die by them come 2000), and "polls are not accurate." Never mind the reality, Messrs. Barr, McCollum, Hutchinson, Rogan, Hyde, et al, that the polls were consistent throughout the impeachment fiasco. Never mind that you lost ground in the November 1998 election when you thought you'd gain. Never mind that the people who upheld your bogus efforts were the conservative right-wingers who hold your purse strings.

None of that matters because, apparently, you can say what you want -- on or off the record -- and not be held accountable.

How many times did we hear, "The American people just need to understand what we're doing here"? Or, "It's up to us to educate the American people about what we're doing here"? These complainers were acting as if we were all merely ignorant, uneducated or confused cave dwellers. How many times did we hear Republicans like Bob Barr say, "This is the only way to remove a President" -- when the issue at hand was about what the charges were? Does he think we forgot him calling for Clinton's impeachment over two years before the name Monica Lewinsky hit the media?

Furthermore, how many opportunities for a House censure resolution did the Republicans gleefully close the door on, despite overwhelming support for such a vote? Why did moderate Republicans fail to fight to vote their conscience? When I read the 10th Amendment, which states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," I find that to mean that a majority of Americans ("the people") wanted a House censure resolution -- which is not specifically forbidden by the Constitution ("powers not delegated"). So why didn't it happen?

The power of "the people" supposedlyresides in the House, but what happened was that the right wing forcibly hijacked that power in 1998. They had the numbers; they had control. They held the floor; they controlled the spin. The right wing consolidated their power to drown out any protest of their culture war against liberalism. In "1984," Orwell accurately summed up this unequivocal silencing of the people when he wrote:

"When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again."