Call it the great liberal hope, the progressive's desire, or even the democracy-lover's dream. Millions of us in this nation long for the day when millions others of our fellow countrymen and women finally wake up to see the Bush administration for what it is: a cadre of greedy, compassionless, war-loving, power-hungry liars. Considering that mountains of easily-attained evidence supporting this assessment can be observed in every direction, we have been baffled for some time that there still remain so many Americans who apparently believe anything the Bushies say. Countless conversations have taken place amongst us over the last two or three years that follow the same general thread:

"Did you read the paper today? Wow--yet another lie by the administration has been exposed. How can anyone not see what they are doing to this country?"

"It's beyond me. Maybe this will be the one that does it."

Except that it never is. Yet we optimistically continue to harbor the wish that our fellow citizens will finally see the light, that just around the corner lies the great "Aha!" moment, the smoking gun that NO one can ignore, the piece of irrefutable proof that clearly reveals, even for the most doubtful, that the president and his cronies are a bunch of dangerous knuckleheads.

Richard Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator and a faithful, 30-year government employee who has worked for the last four presidents, is the latest incarnation of our incessant longing for this mass realization of transformative truth. Calm, sober, intelligent, patriotic, and possessed of an amazing memory, Clarke has delivered a double-barreled salvo of criticism regarding how Bush has handled the "war on terrorism," first in his book “Against All Enemies” and then in his stark testimony before the 9/11 commission. Writing that Bush has "done a terrible job" battling America’s most lethal foes, undoubtedly Clarke's most scathing remarks on the matter came when he told the commissioners: "The reason that I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is that...by invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

Well, what could be more damning than that? There it is, just as throngs of us have repeatedly asserted, and delivered by a credible, long-time Washington insider, no less: The war on Iraq has prolonged, not shortened, America's effort to defeat those who genuinely threaten it. Although the White House has predictably unleashed a furious counterattack with the expected attempts at trashing Clarke's reputation and snide questioning of his motives, it is clear that his is a believable, I-was-there voice that commands serious attention. Surely, his testimony to Bush's incompetence and the administration's bizarre fixation on Iraq, allowing our real enemy al-Qaida precious time to regroup, will be the news that finally awakens the entirely too-large segment of the population that has been in denial all this time about the president and his motives--won't it?

Alas, we shouldn't hold our collective breath. By anyone's standard, a pretty impressive lineup of folks has come forward recently to relate alarming tidbits about the duplicity regularly emanating from the White House, as well as its mind-boggling tone deafness. While unremarkable to those of us who have followed closely the gang that couldn't tell the truth straight, our undying hope has been that each new revelation would open the minds of Bush-backers, too. As of yet, this doesn't appear to be the case, so theorizing that Clarke's testimony will put a permanent dent in Bush's armadillo-like armor is shaky at best. The following is a list, by no means comprehensive, of publicly-voiced witness to Bush's ineptitude and trickery, none of which thus far has motivated sufficient multitudes to call for his censure, resignation, or impeachment (if only he were caught having sex with an intern...):

Weapons inspector David Kay wrote the following in a January 2003 piece for The Washington Post: "The only job the [U.N.] inspectors can expect to accomplish is confirming whether Iraq has voluntarily disarmed. That is not a task that need take months more." In the same article, Kay says, "The only evidence of Iraq's weapons program we need has been clear since early December [2002], when it filed yet another weapons declaration that was anything but full, final and complete....Let's not give [Iraq] more time to cheat and retreat." A year later, in January 2004, after months of his own scouring of Iraq, Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "It turns out that we were all wrong [about Iraq's WMDs]...and that is most disturbing." Most disturbing indeed, assumedly most of all to the thousands of families of American soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq, as well as to the relatives of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis. What happened after Kay's remarks here in America? His new-found religion got some press for awhile, and did actually generate calls for an independent commission to investigate the rationale used to justify the war to which Bush finally caved because it was the politically expedient thing to do. But the president, never known for his eruditeness, demonstrated a novel interpretation of the word "independent" when he personally appointed all of the members of the panel. How about a team of inspectors to search for Bush’s integrity? (Good luck.)

Any news yet from the Justice Department on the White House officials who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent? Plame is the wife of Joseph Wilson, a career diplomat who, by all accounts, has served his country loyally for decades. He also is a man of conscience, and publicly exposed as untrue Bush's claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to use in nuclear bombs. Wilson should know: He's the one who personally investigated the charge at the behest of the vice president's office and determined that the paperwork involved in the whole affair had been amateurishly forged. No matter. Bush used it to try to justify his long-sought invasion of Iraq, and when Wilson went public about the claim's phoniness, lo and behold, a few days later columnist Robert Novak, using information given to him by White House sources, tells the whole world that Wilson's wife is a CIA agent. Considering that war dissenters have routinely been called unpatriotic by Bush people, one might think that the president would pull out all the stops to help locate those in his very employ who would dare to put national security and the careers and even lives of intelligence operatives at risk with such despicable action. But one would be wrong: The president's desire to see "truth prevail" in finding out who tried to get back at Wilson by endangering his wife has apparently dropped so far off Bush's radar it would take one of his proposed manned Mars flights to locate it. The Plame story was news for a time, but the demands for a special prosecutor went unheeded, and the "investigation" has unsurprisingly dragged on now for months with no results. If outrage among the newly-converted is present, it must be currently deep undercover.

I think leading scientists would agree that a group of sixty-two leading scientists, twelve of whom are Nobel laureates, is a pretty impressive array of believable brainpower. Such a collection of American's best and brightest signed a statement of support for a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the lead-in to which states in part:

Across a broad range of issues--from childhood lead poisoning and mercury emissions to climate change, reproductive health, and nuclear weapons--the administration is distorting and censoring scientific findings that contradict its policies; manipulating the underlying science to align results with predetermined political decisions; and undermining the independence of science advisory panels by subjecting panel nominees to political litmus tests that have little or no bearing on their expertise; nominating non-experts or underqualified individuals from outside the scientific mainstream or with industry ties; as well as disbanding science advisory committees altogether.

Clearly, numerous learned scientists have concluded that The Great Experiment is being conducted quite poorly these days in the national laboratory. No ill side effects seem to be surfacing for the president, however, judging by the dearth of protest one might expect to hear from almost 300 million American guinea pigs who will suffer the consequences of his administration's backward, short-sighted policies for years to come.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's own non-flattering views of a curiosity-challenged, detached president and a supporting cast of Iraq-obsessed sidekicks are featured in Ron Suskind's book “The Price of Loyalty.” According to a CBSNEWS.com item about the tome, O'Neill does nothing to diminish the long-held belief by many that Dick Cheney is Bush's puppet-master, claiming that Cheney was among a small group who, to filter information they didn't want Bush to hear, helped form "a praetorian guard that encircled the president." O'Neill makes it clear that ousting Saddam Hussein was on the administration's agenda from the beginning: "From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime. Day one, these things were laid and sealed." O'Neill says that he was troubled considerably by the notion of pre-emptive war but heard no one ask "Why Saddam?" or "Why now?" Reams of documents back up his claims, including those that prove Iraq's occupation and reconstruction particulars were discussed at National Security Council meetings as early as January 2001. Probably O'Neill's most intriguing quote is when he compares Bush in his Cabinet meetings to being "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." It conjures a fascinating image, and is just one more confirmation that Bush and his nearest advisers are, hands-down, the most closed-minded, arrogant ideologues to occupy the White House in memory, if not ever. It's unfortunate, then, that despite the former secretary's recollections of Bush's lack of leadership, too many Americans show a kindredness to the president's hearing-impaired colleagues by remaining strangely mute about O'Neill's assertions.

So what's $100 billion or $200 billion among friends, anyway? New York Times reporter Robert Pear writes that this is the amount Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, estimated that the new prescription drug law would cost above the $400 billion the White House assured Congress it would be, a ceiling critical to securing the votes of balky Republican representatives. The bill almost didn't fly as it was: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert held the House vote open for an historically unprecedented three hours until enough pressure had been applied to pass it by the slimmest of margins. Bush signed it into law in December. Foster had his numbers as far back as June, but recently told the House Ways and Means Committee that he'd been threatened with dismissal by his former boss, Thomas Scully, if he divulged them to Congress before the vote. Foster also told the committee he thought Scully's orders came from the White House and will provide his evidence to a (supposedly) independent investigation of the matter overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services.

I think someone should find out if the new Medicare law also has a provision that covers intensive reality therapy for anyone who thinks this whole sordid episode is anything but a shameless pandering by Bush for the elderly vote. It is a ridiculously expensive, confusing mess that promises $12 billion in giveaways to private insurance companies, precludes the federal government from using its massive bargaining power to lower prescription drug prices, targets a segment of the population that, on average, needs financial assistance the least, and couldn't be passed without procedural chicanery by House minion Hastert and threats of retaliation and outright lies by the White House. Perhaps the cost of a stimulant administered nationally could be covered, too, since not many Americans seem to be all that alert about this half-trillion dollar boondoggle that lines corporate pockets and pushes the Bush deficit even higher into the stratosphere. Upset? Us? Pass the Paxil, please.

Kay, Wilson, scores of distinguished scientists, O'Neill, Foster, and now, perhaps most potentially damaging of all, Clarke--all present serious charges that reveal Bush to be inept, mendacious, or ignorant, or any combination thereof, and any of which alone should be enough to jolt the most lethargic electorate out of its complacency to demand real accountability and detailed explanations. But Americans are a strange bunch; about half of them still remain amazingly unconvinced as to Bush's dubious leadership abilities or his almost pathological resistance to hearing differing points of view. One almost gets the impression that if a video of Bush were to surface, showing him standing at a map of Iraq with a pointer, repeatedly and emphatically detailing his plan to "get Saddam" come hell or high water, a significant segment of the population would still remain ambivalent about his real intentions, somehow rationalizing his prevarications by some weird mechanism of the odd world of logic in which they must reside. So why should we expect the current uproar over Clarke to "be the one" that finally prompts vast numbers of Americans to rise up to do their best Peter Finch imitations?

Experience shows us that we shouldn't, but maybe this is entirely the wrong approach, anyway. It's quite possible there won't be a specific moment of truth that causes the blinders to fall from millions of eyes, simultaneously illuminating for them the administration's destructive polices about which many of us have been screaming for what feels like a very long time now. It just could be that the more realistic scenario is that there will be a gradual enlightenment, that as each White House misdeed is divulged, corroborated, and documented, a few more people will emerge from their analytical slumbers to eventually form large enough blocs (ah, those crucial “swing states”) to vote Bush out of office come November.

After all, at this point, the most important goal obviously is to uproot Bush. It doesn't really make a difference how it happens--whether it results from a mass epiphany or gradual learning curve--as long as it happens. So maybe this can be our new hope, desire, or dream: We care not how people come to their senses, as long as they just do, and help give us back an America free of the ruinous undertakings of the surrealistic Bush and his coterie of dark characters.