A moving article, and idea. Can you make it real, put up a website and Salon somehow remind people every day that it's there? A site that Iraqis with internet access might hear about and someday visit to see the accumulating 'signatures'? This was done in our name, and it's our collective shame. Never mind that our president is a leader whose swaggering excesses exceed my worst imaginings; he still represents us. I have been grieving of late over the story out of Budapest on Oct 24, describing Hungarian protestors clashing with police over the 'scandal' of their prime minister, who apparently lied about the country's economy in order to gain re-election. One lie, imagine that, and it sent thousands of Hungarians to the streets. Remember the simple days of Watergate? And the public response? And now we lie flat under so much more grievous a weight of lies that have brought about the maiming and killing of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. How inexpressibly sad that apologizing may be our best 'action'. When what I really want is to see George Bush impeached. That is what impeachment was supposed to be for, to check abuse of executive powers.

Given sins of this magnitude, I don't see how the patriots in Boston Tea Party times could have felt the degree of rage -- certainly not the futility -- that I'm reading in these letters and acknowledge in myself. We are so dishonorably represented. Whenever I encounter the IMPEACH word applied to Bush-Cheney I am ridiculously cheered, though the word is hardly breathed in the halls of Congress, where they should be shouting it! Even Senator Feingold is not talking Impeach, only Censure. Refusing to pay taxes is probably unworkable these days and so I ask the question, not at all facetiously: What might the modern-day equivalent of a Boston Tea party be? There are over 300 million of us, for heaven's sake.

I've never written a Salon letter before and may not again but these words of Max Cleland's are profoundly moving, and if I had read nothing else on Salon, I would today call the price of membership impossibly cheap. He's somehow written America's autopsy at the same time he provides, through his inspiring example, a prescription for its recovery. I finished reading and thought: if only we had more Clelands. And then: we can all find shards of Max Cleland in ourselves, and we must.

It's a noisy world we live in, much of the cacophony is trivia, and I'm disappointed that all you've done with this offering is pile on more of the same.