Peggy Noonan’s insane “good vibrations” piece put me in mind of impeachment, the attempted — and ultimately successful, if you think ahead to January 2001 — coup that wingnuts and Villagers led against Bill Clinton. If you reject out of hand the possibility that a Robespierre-style reign of terror might be in our best interests as a society (I’m not advocating one, just saying it’s irresponsible not to speculate), you need to read this classic piece that gave birth to the “Villager” coinage.
But Noonan made Cokie and Broder and the rest sound reasonable by comparison:
There was no such joy in Mudville when Mighty Clinton struck out. There were the tears of Tom DeLay, and the sadness of Chris Shays, and, for those watching at home, this: the picture of the murmuring, milling floor of the House as the first article of impeachment got 218 votes and passed. You couldn’t tell anything had happened from what you saw; no one seemed to notice. I cleared my throat and said to my son, “They impeached the president,” and that was the only sound.
Now it’s Monday morning, we’ve all had time to digest and absorb the astounding Allan Drury novel that unfolded this weekend, and one should say it: The good guys finally won.
[….]It seemed to me the perfect metaphor for what had happened in the House this weekend. They were trying to take a grand old institution and make it clean again, make it shine like new. It was the right thing to be doing. It’s how the good guys finally won.
I don’t have to remind anyone here of the perhaps irreparable damage the Bush presidency did to the country. And you don’t have to be Bob Somerby to think that establishment media’s anti-Clinton jihad helped cause that presidency in the first place.
So get out and vote tomorrow. Volunteer too if you have time. If Obama wins by the margins that quantitative experts predict, it will be a dagger at least part way into the the Village’s heart of darkness. Four more years of the Kenyan Usurper and yet another affirmation of reality-based political analysis may undo some of the damage these traitors have inflicted on our nation.
Schlemizel
You may not support it but I do. I’ll even volunteer to learn how to knit so I can keep score as the fuckers heads roll past
I am sick to death of those people and what they have done to my once great country. If that makes me an exclusionary prick so be it
Politically Lost
Since it’s unlikely that the house will change majorities in this election, I fully expect a replay of impeachment. Pick any issue–Benghazi comes to mind–and just wait for the articles for impeachment to be brought to the floor.
I’m sure Issa will be more than happy to sponsor the resolution.
And, then we can see the kind of destructive crap that you just excerpted again.
YAY!
General Stuck
Just sat down and haven’t read any threads today. So if this was covered, fogitaboutit.
maya
Yes. They are traitors and should be hunted down with drones armed with cluster scythes.
EconWatcher
@Politically Lost:
I hope you’re right. Because an impeachment is the sort of thing that will get the House back in 2014. Let the crazy flag fly, I say.
In the meantime, we do have to figure out how to get past that fiscal cliff, though.
Arm The Homeless
OT: CA Supremes kick Koch Bros. in the bollocks. I would love to see a bunch of the inter-mountain West (MT, Hello!?) and CA pols rise up to make a loud point about shadowy money in politics.
In another election where the swarthy Kenyan wasn’t going around shoving his huge bills down white throats, this would be an outrage.
peach flavored shampoo
I cannot wait to bathe in the wingtard tears of one Ms. Jennifer Rubin come Wednesday. Of all the unhinged, borderline cynically insane columnists, she’s the one I expect to just lose her f#cking mind when Money Boo Boo disappears.
Litlebritdifrnt
I swear to the FSM that an ad just popped up on the top of my screen which said “we don’t like young men! We want You!” and among the pics of the supposedly “hot girls” they were using was Mika!
Dave
@Politically Lost:
What would be the violation a la Benghazi that would meet the level of impeachment? The GOP had Clinton’s lie to a grand jury. You may think that the GJ had no business asking what they did, but Clinton still didn’t tell the truth.
I don’t see what fig leaf the GOP has to cover their “Impeach the Black Guy” motive.
taylormattd
Listen. It’s clearly the Villager / Em Ess Em / republican dominated media that helped cause Bush’s presidency, in large part by beating the shit out of Al Gore non-stop.
But I totally disagree with you that the impeachment helped cause Bush’s presidency.
In fact, the impeachment was a bump in the road. It caused such a backlash against republicans that for the first time in like forever, the party of the incumbent president *gained* seats in a mid-term election. Generally speaking, a large part of the electorate *hated* Ken Starr and the congressional republicans’ excesses.
The Moar You Know
Again, as I’m fond of this: Dems owned the political process in this nation from 1933 until 1953. All three branches, veto-proof majorities. Enacted Social Security. Won WWII. Delivered electricity to the rural South.
The instant the Republicans found a sane sounding guy who looked good in a
flight suitgeneral’s uniform we got tossed like a shit-covered tissue.Keep that in mind. The Village will never give up, never surrender. You have to fight them to a draw every day just to stay alive.
Those aren’t the rules, that’s just life. Don’t stop fighting them, but don’t fight because you think you’ll win. There is no “win”.
chopper
@Dave:
but that’s the beauty part. they’ll impeach the dude for skipping church on a sunday. part and parcel of the upcoming GOP civil war, wherein the nuts in house distill themselves to a low grade of moonshine.
japa21
@Dave: You act as if they need a legitimate reason. Not this crowd.
Patricia Kayden
“Four more years of the Kenyan Usurper”
And many more years of Democrats in the White House!
Hope they run Ryan in 2016 so that he can be crushed again.
Arm The Homeless
@Dave: I have no doubts that the Teanut brigade will offer up articles. The nuts in the Senate only have to slow-walk the process in hopes of a midterm wave.
Prelude As Prophecy
Svensker
@Dave:
He watched a live feed of the Benghazi attack while sitting on the couch in the White House and saw Americans coming under fire, heard them beg for help, then ordered any potential aid to “stand down” and went to bed because he loves Muslims more than Americans.
This is what they believe. If it were true, he should be impeached.
And if I were a multi-billionaire, I’ve have lotsa fabulous shoes which my maid would be packing for my next visit to my pied-a-terre in Paris.
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@The Moar You Know:
It’s hard to keep fighting when you don’t think you’ll win.
geg6
Well, I, for one, do not reject a little French revolutionary overthrow of the aristocracy in this country. In fact, I am a very good knitter and will be happy to do my part.
Violet
If they try to impeach Obama, the man who even Republicans admit is a moral, ethical man, there is going to be hell to pay with the American public. That isn’t going to go down well.
Robin G.
As awful as the Republicans have been to Obama, I still don’t think it compares to Clinton. They hate what Obama represents: that their White Angry Male tyrrany is slowly but surely dying. They hated Clinton *personally*.
Hill Dweller
OT: The final WaPo/ABC national tracking poll: Obama 50% – Willard 47%.
EconWatcher
@Dave:
I think the House Republicans now are overall crazier than they were at the time of Clinton’s impeachment, so they wouldn’t need much.
Admittedly, Boehner is saner and more emotionally stable than Gingrich, at least when he’s sober. But I don’t think Boehner will be around much longer. Cantor is sharpening his knives and studying the space between Boehner’s shoulder blades as we speak….
hitchhiker
They had the lie to the grand jury because they set it up, and did a bad job of setting it up at that. It was a perjury trap on a subject that wasn’t relevant to anything and in the end didn’t meet the “level of impeachment” that might have resulted in a senate conviction, but whatever.
I bring it up to point out that they don’t really need a “level of impeachment” offense. To them, Obama himself is the offense, just as Clinton was.
What I think will be fascinating in the next two years is watching to see how much pull the TP still holds on the R party. They had a 2 to 1 spending advantage, a compliant press, a sluggish economy, and they couldn’t term limit Obama. They were defending less than half as many senate seats as the Ds, and they may actually end up worse off than before the election. They’re going to lose some house seats, though sadly not enough.
All that spells FAILURE in capital letters, and on top of it the opinion-makers are finally talking about global warming without putting imaginary quotation marks around it.
We’re going to get two more SC Justices named and approved. They’ve lost the narrative of America . . . it will be fun to watch them wrap their brains around that.
Comrade Dread
@Dave: Well, McCain already said that it’s worse than Watergate, so… who knows?
I’m not convinced they’ll do it. I think it far more likely they just keep playing the same obstructionist games they are now and try and ride out their time until 2014 or 2016.
David Koch
@Hill Dweller: another junk poll by the liberal media trying to suppress the conservative vote.
Violet
@Svensker: Hey there, how’s the cold? I’m doing a bit better today, but still tire easily. Seems to have settled into my chest and I’m coughing up gunk today.
Keith G
This is stupid hyperbole. I hate it when they toss BS like that toward us, so it saddens me when it is so easily used over here.
Is your vocabulary so limited?
Robin G.
@hitchhiker:
I’m shamelessly praying that Scalia dies of a heart attack while Obama’s in office. Ghoulish but true.
Eric U.
@Robin G.: I think this is true too, although part of this is the relative sanity of the cable networks. With Clinton, all of the cable news networks had garbage about Whitewater on every night. It was a constant din of insanity. Now that is mostly contained to Fox.
General Stuck
@Robin G.:
The reason I don’t agree with this, besides the obvious skin color factor amongst large racist/xenophobe seg of the GOP, is that Clinton gave the wingnuts a lot more than Obama has, as for right wing legislation/welfare reform etc…. And I am not talking about rhetoric.
Obama passed the largest discretionary spending bill in history, and labeled it stimulus, when it was chock full of cash for prog dem initiatives. The he passed HCR that the nutters had blocked for a hundred years. And to add insult to injury, unlike Clinton, Obama has given them zilch in the way of personal fuckups they could chew on to sate their anger, with their conspiracy committees and theories, leading to impeachment. And we aren’t even into an Obama second term yet.
Svensker
@Violet:
Finally better! And mostly no gunk coming out now, just nose bleeding from being so enfeebled by all its exertions. Got hardly any sleep last night but still feel 100% better than I did. So 9 days for me — hope yours is shorter. Eat honey, supposedly it actually helps cut cold duration. Even if it doesn’t, what’s not to like about that medicine?
PeakVT
@General Stuck: It seems to me that the CRUT is rather small (less than $1M, vs $250M in net worth and ~$20M income in 2010) to enable Rmoney to not pay any federal income taxes whatsoever (though it undoubtedly knocked his bill down).
No matter what the case may be, I think the story is too late to make a difference one way or another. However, I am curious about how long Bloomie has had the information, and if the editors have been sitting on it. Releasing the story on the eve of the election looks like CYA move enabling them to say: we’re honest, we reported it instead of holding it through the election.
Redshift
@hitchhiker:
In the words of Ken Starr (allegedly), “We know he must be guilty of something, we just have to find out what.”
hueyplong
I’m not sure it matters too much which guy (Clinton or Obama)the GOP hates more. The point is that they’ll impeach any sitting Democrat merely on a determination that they can.
When the third one comes up, this will be more clear.
The Moar You Know
@Arm The Homeless: An Arizona group trying to fuck with California politics will go down like dogshit in your sushi here. Californians hate zonies with a white-hot fury in the first place – coming over and playing dirty pool with our politics ain’t gonna fly.
General Stuck
@PeakVT:
I have no idea the veracity of Boomberg’s claim he did not pay income taxes for that period.
And Yup, it is likely too late for the election. But it gives me a small rush none the same.
Violet
@Svensker: I’m not yet up to a week yet, and am better, but still tired. No idea where I got this–probably just out and about. I slept better last night and that always helps with any recovery. I’ll try some honey. Like you said, what’s not to like.
Bokonon
@Violet: not so. I constantly hear claims from my wingnut friends about the extremely horrendously awful and unprecedented levels of corruption that is going on in the Obama administration (along with cries of “Wake up, America!”). Which these people do by passing on chain e-mails, repeating things obtained from Breitbart in their Facebook posts, the usual stuff.
Whatever the official party line, or the respectable Beltway opinion, the grassroots is screaming corruption, corruption, corruption … and they are being stirred up with partisan propaganda and agitprop.
Disheartening. You can say a lot of things about the Obama Administration, but “unbridled corruption” sure ain’t one of them.
Svensker
@Redshift:
My hub and I were certified wingnuts at that point and convinced that Clinton had murdered Vince Foster, which was the LEAST of his crimes (no really, we believed it). Then Starr came out with his big report and we watched with bated breath, waiting for the evidence for the horror we just KNEW was there. When it was all over, we looked at each other and said, “That was it? That was what they found? A dress with stains?” And that was the first step back on the road to sanity.
Dork
@General Stuck: Oh my. Wow.
Anoniminous
@hitchhiker:
Odds are we’re looking at another 2 years of a GOP controlled House.
Countering, the 2012 election has been so weird I’m not ready to throw in the towel and call it a done deal. We’ll know in 48 hours so – what the hey! – might as well be optimistic.
Eric U.
“Even the liberal” The New Republic had a long article about the Clinton crimes. Drug running, Clinton body count, the whole 9 yrds. Crazy times.
Wouldn’t know if they have done the same thing to Obama, because I cancelled my subscription. I think I would have heard had they done such a thing.
28 Percent
The best legal hook to hang impeachment on that I can think of would be a challenge to the legality of the military action in Libya, as usurping Congress’s prerogative to declare war. With the Senate in Democratic hands, it would be a futile gesture, and resting it on the premise of the Office of the Presidency being too strong in the Commander-In-Chief department does strike one as being anathema to Republicans, but I could see them trying it.
trollhattan
@The Moar You Know:
Annnd, here we go:
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/#storylink=cpy
Keith G
@hueyplong:
I have watched the leadership of the right devolve as the previous generation has left the stage. Instead of a mixture of personalities, there is now a critical mass of those who are powered by a bullying authoritarianism. They are convinced of what is best for them and will brook no opposition. And when pressed, they will counter attack with all methods available.
In a sense, it is not personal. It’s just what they will do in all cases.
Arm The Homeless
@The Moar You Know: The Left Coast has to be the leader on this crap, unfortunately. I live in a place so supremely blessed with a natural paradise, and yet so callously harvested. Both sound environmental policy and good-governance are in short supply here. You folks have to lead the way and help us drag the idiots along with us.
trollhattan
Also, too, here’s the form filed with the CA secretary of state. Such a simple thing.
http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/PDFGen/pdfgen.prg?filingid=1712404&amendid=0
catclub
@Robin G.: “I’m shamelessly praying that Scalia dies of a heart attack ”
I am hoping that Obama personally thanks Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch in his victory speech, for making his opponents so terrible and keeping him sharp, and Roger Ailes strokes out.
forked tongue
Pretty words don’t mean much any more, DougJ.
MikeJ
@forked tongue: IO was wondering why he left the “hat” off. Doesn’t really make sense as it is. If he doesn’t know what a “kiss me quick” hat is, he’s never been to Blackpool, or even Brighton.
28 Percent
@trollhattan: they raise so much, and to so little effect…
My prediction: in future election cycles, the money is going to be diluted to Congressional and State offices rather than the all-or-nothing presidential campaign. A few years ago you could pretty much buy a congressional seat for $500K. A Senate seat was less expensive than the Senator’s brownstone, and was cheap at twice the price. Those numbers are going to soar. The White House is high profile, but it’s Congress that holds the purse strings, and that’s where the real ROI is.
hitchhiker
@Robin G.:
I thought everybody was shamelessly praying that Scalia dies of a heart attack while Obama’s in office!
Srsly . . . what I long for is that something happens to Justice Thomas that’s short of death but enough to make him retire. I don’t wish him gone, oh no. That would be too kind. He needs to have many years to watch while saner people take his place and undo his damage to our country.
bemused
@Svensker:
Wow. You two were in deep. The road back must have been painful. My hat is off to you. Did it take a long time or once one stitch was removed, did it all unravel rapidly?
Svensker
@bemused: It happened pretty quick. I really relate to Paul’s “road to Damascus” moment, because that’s how it felt.
bemused
@Svensker:
I can’t imagine how that felt when everything flipped but thankfully you got through it. I just wish more people would be able to do it.
Davis X. Machina
Historians will point to 12/12/2000, not 9/11/2001, as the catastrophe of the early century for the US.
Steeplejack
@General Stuck:
Bloomberg did not claim that. (By the way, the Bloomberg article came out over a week ago. And I think it was covered here, or at least mentioned in the comments.)
Note: I am not slamming General Stuck! But this is a case of blogospheric malfeasance (at Crooks & Liars).
From Stuck’s link, Nicole Belle at Crooks & Liars:
Even thought the first word in her pull quote is “Bloomberg” and it’s a hyperlink, the link goes not to Bloomberg but to a diarist at DailyKos named Kavips, who writes:
Nicole Belle changes the quote to omit the word “theoretically” and to toss out “along with foreign tax credits and deferred capital gains losses.”
Here’s the somewhat bland Bloomberg story that’s at the bottom of it all. It is datelined October 29.
If you read that, you see that, as one Crooks & Liars commenter put it, it’s a stretch “from a tax shelter that he could no longer contribute to after 1996 to believing that this alone could take care of all his tax liabilities. Given that his net worth is a quarter billion dollars and the CRUT had $750,000 in 2001 and $421,000 in 2011 it looks like one more of many shelters.”
In fact, as one DKos commenter points out, the Bloomberg article “strongly suggests that the CRUT couldn’t possibly explain a failure to pay any taxes.”
End of (non-)story.
General Stuck
@Steeplejack:
Well, fiddlesticks. Guess I won’t trust Nicole as a matter of routine anymore. Purty good detective work, Sherlock
Enhanced Mooching Techniques
So what did Noonan have to say when the “bad guys” won in the Senate? And thank you very much Noonan, you worthless bitch, for doing your part to reduce the political discourse into some kind of dualistic war against good and evil.