Thing is, we’re not Republicans, and most of the authoritarians on the (D) side of the aisle are at least trying to keep one foot in the Reality-Based Community. We can’t just scream NIXON DID IT FIRST AND BESIDES REAGAN WAS WORSE AND ALSO DUBYA? WAR CRIMINAL! (which would at least have the advantage of being true statements) and then pretend the made-up scandal-of-the-moment never happened. Events must be discussed, and even mistakes. Consequences will be explored. But unlike the Authoritarians (like any religion, it’s a mindset and a lifestyle) “we” Democratic voters, DFHs, progressives (pick your label) don’t have a fixed template for discussing missteps by “our guys” that don’t do more harm than good. What can be said that can’t be misinterpreted, especially when the other side is expert in misinterpretation, and our (presumed) allies are hypersensitive in a thousand different ways?
Which leads to weird portmanteau articles, like Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast on “The Coming Attempt to Impeach Obama“:
… I think the notion of impeachment is industrial-strength insane. There is utterly no proof that the President Obama even knew anything directly about the shifting Benghazi responses, let alone did something about them (yes, folks; under the Constitution, the President must do something). And as for the Internal Revenue Service story, from what we now know, those transgressions were committed by IRS staffers in Cincinnati who have never been closer to Obama than their television sets… Impeachment is crazy… and the idea that Obama has any direct culpability in either of these matters is, given what we know today, utter madness. Okay?
But this is my point: utter madness is what today’s Republicans do. You can present to me every logical argument you desire. Benghazi at the end of the day was a terrible tragedy in which mistakes, bad mistakes, were certainly made, and in which confusion and the CYA reflex led to some bad information going out to the public initially, but none of this remotely rises to the level of high crime. The IRS cock-up was just that, a mistake by a regional office. I get all this, and I agree with you.
But what we think doesn’t matter. I can assure you that already in the Pavlovian swamps of the nutso right, the glands are swelling. Theirs is a different planet from the one you and I inhabit….
… They do their base’s bidding, not America’s. How many times do you need to see them do this before you accept that it is the reality? And now there’s an added element. They want to gin up turnout among their base for next year’s elections. And if they gin it up enough, and the Democratic base stays home, they could end up holding the House and taking the Senate. And if they have both houses, meaning that the vote in the House would not be certain to hit a Senate dead-end, well, look out.
I hope the White House knows this. I hope they understand, I hope the President himself understands, that the fever has not broken and will not break. It might crescendo right up to his very last day in office. And yes, a lot of this Benghazi stuff is about Hillary Clinton. But not all of it. And the IRS thing, which Drudge led with for two days in a row and may yet be bigger than Benghazi, isn’t about her at all. If my worst fears are never realized—well, good, obviously. But it will only be because they couldn’t identify even a flimsy pretext on which to proceed. Never put the most extreme behavior past them. It is who they are, and it is what they do.
Villago Delenda Est
These asswipes WANT civil war.
That’s what it boils down to.
Bring it on, motherfuckers.
Short Bus Bully
The IRS “thing” will be bigger than Benghazi. The right is BEGGING for this kind of victimhood and persectution.
A dead diplomat just can’t compare to that self-flagelation.
SatanicPanic
Does anyone pay attention to these people anymore? Most people are probably thinking “good, I can’t stand those Tea Party morons”
Spaghetti Lee
I think the average person will not distinguish this from the screaming and howling the right wing has been doing about Obama since, oh, forever. That’s part of what’s amazing about the insanity-we used to associate Republicans with being at least tactically smart, and this isn’t even that. They’re banking the midterms on enough people getting angry about a few people in the IRS reviewing the Tea Party’s finances extra carefully? Well, good luck.
Forkbeard
@Short Bus Bully: Gotta agree. Was listening to Mark Levin on way the way home (because I want to punish myself, I guess), and he was flipping out and having a ragegasm against this already, taking comments completely out of context and making it a general assault upon conservatism and FREEDOM for which Obama was directly and intentionally responsible.
Levin has always been the ‘intellectual’ side of Hannity and Rush; if he’s trying to make this impeachable material, that’s already where the lizard brain of the rest of the party is.
Spaghetti Lee
He’s right about the possibility of the Republicans gaining the Senate. I would like to point out, however, that in 2012, the Republicans gaining the 4-four!-seats they needed for a Senate majority was considered a sure thing. Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota. And they went 0-4. Well, now they need 8. Yeah, you’ve got your Louisianas and your South Dakotas and your Montanas, but it seems less likely now than it did in 2012.
PeakVT
2014 is a base election, as in fire up yours and depress the other teams’s marginal voters. I’m not sure if an impeachment trial on such empty particulars (Benghazi or the IRS nothingburger) would be effective in accomplishing the latter task. But right now the two non-scandals are the best issues the Repukes have to animate the Repuke base. The hate and fear of Obamacare has died down for now.
mclaren
Where’s the evidence that the authoritarians on the Democratic side of the aisle are “at least trying to keep a foot in reality”?
Joe Biden is the worst Republican of them all. This is a man who openly called for a “D-Day in the War on Drugs.” This is the man who authored the repressive unconstitutional fascistic prescursor for the USA Patriot Act, and now boasts that “the Patriot Act was my bill.”
This is the man who eagerly urged the White House to “give it one last shot” for three long years in Iraq, long after that insane pointless unwinnable counterproductive war kept wrecking American credibility and destroying our military and trashing our reputation around the world and corrupting the American military with the moral gangrene of torture and bribery and official lying about how we were “winning the battle for hearts and minds.”
The obot commenters on this site who constantly give aid and cover to the torturers and the extrajudicial murderers and the East German-style polizei who are working hard to turn America into another gray dreary police state where muggers with badges listen to everyone’s phone calls and read everyone’s email — people like Mnemosyne and eemom and burnspbesq — are Republicans to the bone. These people hate the Bill of Rights with every fiber of their being. These people reflexively click their heels whenever their President asks to do something heinous, no matter what it is, and they vomit up laughably outlandish excuses for every descent into barbarism the White House makes.
Murdering innocent women and children with drones? It’s war! Torturing Iraqi prisoners? The AUMF! Sending assassination squads around the world to murder American citizens without a trial or criminal charges? They brought it on themselves by speaking out against the Sacred Leader! Listening to the phone calls of everyone in America? 9/11, chump! An out-of-control police-surveillance-torture complex that sends whistleblowers like John Kiriakou to prison for revealing the White House and the Pentagon’s corruption and crimes, while the torturers and bribe-takers and criminals stay safe and wealthy? That’s the price of freedom, asshole! Obama lying repeatedly that he can’t prosecute the Wall Street financial crime lords when prosecutor after prosecutor was proclaimed there’s plenty of evidence to file charges? Obama has his hands tied by congress, he’s a helpless impotent gnat!
Lie after lie after lie to protect the corrupt torturers and the criminals. These people talk like Republicans, they walk like Republicans, they have no patience for reality and anothing but sneering jeering contempt for evidence and documented facts. Burnspbesq jeers at Glenn Greenwald as a purveyor of “hot air” when Greenwald cites studies and official reports showing that Obama has targeted first aid responders to initial drone strikes with additional drone strikes — the hallmark of the terrorist, the very definition of the mad-dog genocidal murderers like Carlos the jackal and the Red Brigade.
Eemom showers people with acid ridicule for stating the documented fact that Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents put together.
These Democrats care about reality?
Get real. These Democrats don’t give a shit about reality. They regard reality as a disposal form of kleenex to be wadded up and thrown away and rewritten the instant it becomes inconvenient. The “secret kill list” Obama uses? Don’t know what you’re talking about! No such thing! You’re mentally ill! Off your meds! You’re crazy! You’re ranting and raving!
TSA VIPR stops that shut down traffic on freeways for warrantless searches? No such thing! Fantasy! As one of the deluded fringe-lunatic obot commenters remarked on this forum “mental illness is a hell of a drug.” Any citation of the documented facts about Obama’s ongoing trashing of the bill of rights and basic rights like due process (amendment 5) and the right to the trial by a jury of your peers (amendment 6) and the absolute prohibition of torture (amendment 8) brings nothing but a howl of derision from these reality-denying crackpots.
That’s a Republican response. “Drill, baby, drill!” Evolution? No such thing! Global warming? Giant hoax.
Exact same attitude, slightly different targets. The Republicans ridicule documented climate science, the obot Democrats ridicule anyone who cites the constitution. If you think there’s a difference, you’re not part of the solution — you’re part of the problem.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@SatanicPanic: The news media pay attention to them, which is enough to push their agenda and outrage onto a lot of people.
JGabriel
@Spaghetti Lee:
When you spend 46 years pandering and appealing to stupid, racist, sexist, xenophobic, insane wingnuts (I’m using 1967 as the start year for Nixon’s Southern Strategy), eventually insane wingnuts will become the majority not just of your voters — they will become the majority of your candidates as well.
And stupid reactionaries aren’t good at tactics. The GOP is reaping the fruits it sowed. And sowed. And sowed …
Republicans have become their own autocatalytic mire of madness.
.
Spaghetti Lee
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Said it before, I’ll say it again. People here vastly overestimate the influence the mainstream media has on most people. The huge majority of people don’t watch the Sunday morning shows or read David Brooks or the WaPo or the WSJ, and among those who do, fewer still hang on every word they say. I have never once had someone talk to me about those media in a way that lots of people here seem to think, that they’re the last word on the issues for millions of people. People who care will care. People who don’t, won’t.
It’s hard thinking about what a non-news junkie thinks when you’ve been a news junkie your whole life, but I think it’s something folks ought to keep in mind.
piratedan
scary thing is, I can’t argue at all with the posted article. TBH I’ve been very surprised that no one has attempted to kill BHO yet, it’s not as if Faux hasn’t cast him as their own personal Beelzebub and gone through the various ministrations from their “entertainment” hosts casting about for anyone to rid us of the Ursurper, be it through impeachment or any other second amendment remedies that could be at hand.
There’s a small cadre of very scared tiger riders over there in the R camp that obviously don’t believe that they’re to blame for any of the ;polarization that exists in this country and it’s plainly obvious that they don’t care. They want to be in charge. Some for the money, some for the power and some because they’re scared that life in these United States is no longer resembling an episode of Leave it to Beaver and they oh so desperately want to return to those times when white Christians were in charge.
There are times when I wish I could take a baseball bat to their knees to refocus their attention.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Spaghetti Lee: All of the nightly network news broadcasts devoted significant time to this tea party IRS thing. They are exactly the shows watched by “non-news junkies”.
Joseph Nobles
@mclaren: Obama sinking back into the pit of darkness from whence he came: you can almost taste it, can’t you?
LosGatosCA
The bad thing about the batshit crazy (all) Republicans is that they are batshit crazy. The good thing about this generation of batshit crazy Republicans is that they are incapable of keeping their freak flag hidden. It has never made any sense for anyone outside of the 1% to vote for Republicans, unless they were having some other psychotic mental addiction being fed. The code words (see Atwater, Lee) used to be good enough to keep the batshit under wraps, discussed in quiet rooms where the rest of the normal folks didn’t have to deal with it.
But these folks are not just batshit crazy, they’re impulsive narcissistic bullies, courtesy of Faux News and El Rushbo infinite feedback loop, who now think they should be able to talk in public without the code words and nobody should be allowed to criticize them.
William F Buckley was every bit as hateful as the current group, but he played the long game. Smile, use big words, pretend/imply their is some empiricism backing up your claims and let Republican money work its magic. Pick your spots – remember winning is the important thing. Save the ranting and gloating for the private NR cruises.
Or to use a sports analogy, the Republican team wants to work the refs on every call, constantly complain about rules, retaliate on every play they think is unfair or dirty, trash talk like its the WWE, and then when people rightly claim they are inappropriately belligerent, dirty, bunch of whiners with a shrinking fan base they are surprised.
I say keep being the appropriately belligerent, dirty, bunch of whiners. It’s a lot easier to compete against untalented, classless losers than skilled politicians who smoothly lie about their real intentions.
Spaghetti Lee
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Looked up the numbers and about 22 million people watch the nightly network news total, the big three all put together. Some of them are already on our side, some just kind of watch it out of habit and don’t believe everything they hear, etc. What you’re left with is a group the majority of whom probably hates Obama already .
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Spaghetti Lee: there’s an awful lot of waving of hands in that statement.
Spaghetti Lee
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Well, sorry, I’m just not buyin’ it. Ginned-up non-scandals come and go.
SatanicPanic
@Spaghetti Lee: We’ve all seen this movie before- Clinton’s second term was the same damn thing. Plus we went through 2+ years of Republicans screaming about Obama’s birth certificate and generally destroying any credibility they once had. I could be wrong, but I imagine people are just going to say “crazy Republicans again” and ignore it.
David Koch
what missteps?
there isn’t a democrat connected to the irs thing. the clown in charge of the irs was a tenured bush appointee.
Benghazi? we’ve had a thorough investigation by Pickering and Mullen. people were fired. The talkin points they whine about were written by Petraeus.
NotMax
‘They’ will flame out on this and pounce on the next shiny commotion.
To paraphrase what was said of P.D.Q. Bach’s penchant for plagiarism — their enmity is limited only by their faulty technique.
Linda Featheringill
I think that actually impeaching Obama would be a mistake for the Republicans for a couple of reasons.
The first reason is not intellectual at all. People who have tried to utterly destroy Obama have fallen flat on their faces. Luck, guardian angels, will of God, or whatever.
The other reason is that such an effort would probably keep the Dems engaged in the ongoing struggle. We outnumber them. They can’t win unless we don’t vote.
Of course, it would be insanity to try to predict what the Republicans will actually do. Who knows?
JMG
Is Tomaskey aware that it requires 68 of 100 Senators voting guilty to impeach?
BillinGlendaleCA
@JMG: The House impeaches, the Senate votes to convict or not. Simple majority in the House is impeachment(see Bill Clinton), but 2/3’s in the Senate to convict and remove from office.
Hoodie
The problem with impeachment is that it requires an investigation and trial, you know, facts. One would think this would make impeachment a bridge too far for Republicans, because there don’t seem to be any actionable facts in any of this, particularly with respect to Obama. An impeachment proceeding in the House will likely be a farce that will bring out all the nuttiness of the House Republican delegation, and it will likely end up looking like a show trial. It will go nowhere in the Senate. However, this thing may have a life of its own, and the Republicans may not be able to turn it off.
raven
Guess who thinks this is NIXONIAN????
max
@Villago Delenda Est: These asswipes WANT civil war.
Well, yeah, that’s why they’ve been engaging in one for years. 1994 was a Revolution according to them. (And it was in the bad ‘coup’ sense.)
We can’t just scream NIXON DID IT FIRST AND BESIDES REAGAN WAS WORSE AND ALSO DUBYA? WAR CRIMINAL!
I’m pretty sure neither Nixon or Reagan made it to ‘war criminal’ in any strict sense. W. very definitely made it to war criminal – by dint of apparently deciding to read the treaties in question so as to find ways to break them. (That sort of thinking was in the air at the time.) If you could somehow drag the three of them up in front of a Nuremberg tribunal, Reagan would get off, Nixon would probably get off, and W. would get the noose. Not prison, the noose. If Nixon did get some time in the pokey for war crimes, so would Johnson, I expect. Obama’s record is that he is staunchly against war crimes and refuses to commit any and hasn’t.
But unlike the Authoritarians (like any religion, it’s a mindset and a lifestyle) “we” Democratic voters, DFHs, progressives (pick your label) don’t have a fixed template for discussing missteps by “our guys” that don’t do more harm than good.
Depends on what we’re talking about: if we’re talking about the whole police/state surveillance/IRS harassment thing, well it’s Wilson, Edgar Hoover, Hoover, Hoover, Hoover, HUAC/Truman (a bit) and a whole bunch more of that through Nixon. And then Reagan picked up the thread again. If we want to talk about it to/at conservatives, we say ‘running an authoritarian police state has been a conservative goal since ever so I don’t know what you’re whining about’ followed by ‘where the fuck do you get off?’ and also, ‘how about you take your fucking pissy princess act and shove it up your ass?’
One could advance a similarly rude case about Bush & Obama and Iraq & Benghazi.
The correct response is, ‘Produce evidence of an impeachable crime, and until then, shut the fuck up. Or just drop the pretense and pass a Bill of Impeachment, because it’s not like you weren’t going to or can’t, and then it’ll get voted down and we can all have a nice laugh.’
I don’t think this has anything to do with liberalism per se, and everything to do with culture, namely refusing to call these ratbags the lowlife scum-sucking bullshitting fuckwits they are. To their face, the more often the better.
max
[”You wouldn’t say that to my face!!!’ ‘Actually I would, weenieboy. Now go eat shit and die.”]
raven
This Lisa Meyers is a piece of work.
BillinGlendaleCA
From what I know about this, Justice got a court order(probably FISA) for this info. Nixon didn’t get any court orders.
David Koch
@raven: why aggravate yourself by watching that assclown?
raven
@David Koch: To see what they say. Woodward is on too!
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Woodward, is he on later?
Baud
For a break from the Village idiocy, Minnesota is about to become state no. 12 on marriage equality.
pluege
from what we now know, those transgressions were committed by IRS staffers
transgressions????? Hardly. the IRS has every reason to believe conservatives are cheating, or attempting to cheat on the requirements of 501c tax exempt. They were doing their job.
NotMax
@raven
(with apologies to Simon & Garfunkel)
♫ Are they acting like Scarborough’s fair
Mika, Geist, and Barnicle too… ♫
Kay
@Spaghetti Lee:
They really are that crazy, though, the GOP base, and that’s who he’s talking about in a midterm. That’s who come out.
They believe Obama has been breaking laws for years, and he finally got caught. They’re going to demand something be done.
It’s why they repeal the health care law in the House once a month. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t repeal the health care law. The GOP base want them to DO SOMETHING about Obama.
I think it will drive turnout. But I also think if it hadn’t been this it would have been something else.
Patricia Kayden
@PeakVT: But the Republicans are blocking funding for Obamacare and therefore stopping it from being fully implementing.
Kay
It still shocks me how beholden they are to their base.
They can’t pass the Medicaid expansion in Ohio. Kasich supports it. Rural area providers support it (rural hospitals are completely dependent on Medicaid).
There have been huge rallies. Thousands of people.
They can’t do it. They’re too scared.
Patricia Kayden
@David Koch: Thank you. I don’t get how any of these non-scandals are actual scandals that can hurt President Obama or the Dems in general. People who hate Obama will believe anything.
What exactly is scandalous about Benghazi?
How is President Obama connected to the IRS issue?
How is President Obama connected to DOJ’s investigating AP reporters?
Yes, we already know the Republicans are angling to impeach Obama on anything. That doesn’t mean that there are actual grounds for impeachment — they’ll just gin something up. Just like they did with President Clinton.
Schlemizel
@NotMax:
Remember that there is brain damage there, and a pot of po-litical slime
Baud
@Kay:
I remember how shockingly low turnout was for the last GOP presidential primary. In a state legislative primary, incumbents lose if they lose the votes of something like 5 voters.
f space that
@raven: Here’s how it would be Nixonian. Obama or someone working under his orders calls 1111 Constitution Ave. “Hey this fucker Joe Scarborough is really pissing off the POTUS. We need you to pull up his account and check it for problems.” “Also, send us a copy of the transcript of the account.” IRS boss calls up his minions and repeats said order which came from POTUS. Eventually the account information makes its way back to the executive branch. Because of the 1998 hearings and subsequent legislation, all IRS employees involved with this little operation are subject to massive fines and jail time (these laws did not exist in Nixon’s time).
As I said yesterday, anyone comparing this to Nixon needs to have their dick slammed in a car door.
Schlemizel
It should be noted at this juncture of the foul mouth Dick foreshadowing.
In 1992 BEFORE the inauguration Congressman Army stated “When we impeach President Clinton”
This shit is now a basic part of the goopers playbook. Any Dem President in office with a gooper Congress will get this treatment for any manufactured thing they can scheme up.
Kay
@Baud:
I think the focus should be on states in 2014. It already is in OH, but we have a competent Democratic Party with a good chair. He’s personally an asshole, Chris Redfern, but he’s good at his job.
They’re vulnerable in some big states, PA, FL.
If they do a good job in the states, Senate races will take care of themselves.
I, personally, would put everything there and let DC do what DC does.
Baud
@Kay:
And they have YOU in Ohio. I wish every state had a Kay.
BillinGlendaleCA
@f space that: Wait, 1998 legislation? Joe Scar was a Congress Critter back in 98. Wonder if he voted for it?
Xenos
@max: The term civil war really does not apply. Coup d’état, yes.
We had a judicial coup in 2000, and they would love to pull something like that off again.
They can’t even start to pull it off, though, unless they unleash a state of instability first. The instability of the late Clinton era made the public much more willing to accept the last coup. I don’t think it can be repeated successfully, but I expect them to try. The gridlock and collapse of public faith in our governing system and culture is part of their preparations while they await the main chance.
f space that
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yes he did. The bill passed the House in November of 1997, signed by Clinton in 1998.
Todd
Did Jane forget to pay the hamsters at FDL? I got no tbogg, and the main page goes to linky redirects.
Southern Beale
News from Aurora, Colorado:
Just another responsible gun owner!
In other news, WTF is wrong with Aurora, CO? Must be cursed.
Joey Maloney
Anyone know what’s up with Firedoglake? I haven’t been able to read that somewhat popular blogger since early yesterday.
Patrick
@raven:
She is a joke. I recall back in 2008/2009 when the big banks got bailed out. Shortly thereafter, one of the banks held a motivational retreat for some of their key employees in Las Vegas. And Lisa Meyers made a big stink out of “look – here’s how your bail out money is being used. But don’t worry, I Lisa Meyers is on it”
What she conveniently forgot to say was that the event had been planned for years. Furthermore and more importantly, if the bank had cancelled the event they would have forfeited almost the entire amount that the event cost.
But the consequence of her bad reporting made other banks cancel similar events. They didn’t save bail out money by doing that. But at least the Lisa Meyers of the world couldn’t make stuff up about them.
Seriously, she is a joke.
Todd
@Kay:
I’ve always said that the ruralities, even though conservative, have a populist streak, particularly when there is productive agriculture in the region and it is treated as a business. The real electoral problem (and from whence the truly batshit candidates spring) is the suburbs/exurbs; all those brave, hardworking, self-reliant white paper-shufflers who are economically dependent on urban employment and urban services, but who don’t really need it because they’re so self-sufficient, and Jesus, and wolverines. Of course, it helps that they’ve totally tapped into urban scale while expecting the urbans to pay for a big chunk of it, because Jesus, and ‘Murka.
Matt McIrvin
There is no way they can get the two-thirds Senate majority required to convict. This would be the Clinton circus redux, but with even less actual substance behind it unless they can dig up some actual dirt on Barack Obama himself.
And even if they could… what, do they think they’re somehow going to get Biden too and put John Boehner in the White House? If they can’t manage that, and if the whole thing appears as nakedly partisan as it is, I don’t think it will work out well for them.
Bendal
@Hoodie:
I tried to explain that to a FB acquaintance last night, who wanted to know “why hasn’t Obama been impeached yet?”.
When I asked her what crime has Obama committed that would require impeachment, I got the Faux News talking points of “Benghazi! IRS!” with her friends chiming in agreeing with her. After pointing out that the ambassador’s murder wasn’t really Obama’s fault, and that the President has spoken strongly against the IRS’ behavior, the derpy responses ratcheted up to 11, even trotting out the old “his birth certificate is invalid” argument.
Believe me, there’s an undercurrent of people in this country who have never accepted Obama as President, and will urge their representatives in Congress to sieze onto even the slightest (or imaginary) infraction to use as an excuse for impeachment. They think/hope that once the whole country sees this “evidence” of his wrongdoing, he will have no choice but to resign or be convicted of his ‘crime’ by the Senate. They are that delusional.
Joey Maloney
@Matt McIrvin:
Well, that was their brilliant plan in 1996: Convict Clinton, (somehow) force Gore to resign and presto! President Gingrich.
No one has yet gone broke overestimating the batshittery of the Republican Congress.
David Koch
Here’s a good article by the LA Times on the AP phone records.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-na-telephones-ap-20130514,0,5698169.story
no laws were broken. WH not involved. investigating leak of sensitive information in bomb plot. Even though the story made the government look good, they asked the AP not to print it, but they went ahead and did.
Patrick
@Bendal:
I am at a total loss why Benghazi should lead to impeachment. Were they then in favor of Reagan being impeached since more embassy people were killed during him than Obama? They whole thing is nuts.
The problem for Republicans is that they have been screaming scandal for the tiniest things for so long that people have stopped listening.
His birth certificate is a fake, Solyndra – I was told this was impeachable, Fast and Furious was even worse, and this Benghazi thing has gone on forever.
And on the IRS thing – how the hell can you impeach Obama since this was done during a Bush appointee? Do these people seriously think the Bush appointee was told by Obama to go after Tea party groups and then actually did it???
Which planet do these people spend most of their time?
BillinGlendaleCA
Wingnut, the sky is purple I hear.
Xenos
@Patrick: They seem to think that a cover-up is a crime, but have not thought things through far enough to realize that covering up something that is not a crime is not a crime.
Otherwise every President would be subject to impeachment within days of inauguration, if not hours.
f space that
@Matt McIrvin: Doesn’t mean that Articles of Impeachment won’t be filed. 2014 is a base election,we will hear about nothing but Benghazi and IRS for the next 2 years, unless something else happens. Dems had better get off their collective asses and vote in 2014.
Baud
@f space that:
The risk for them with impeachment is that it might wake up a lot of folks who have generally tuned out politics.
debbie
@Xenos:
Nor have they remembered what they’ve been covering up: ALEC, for one.
Kay
Can I start using “culture of intolerance”? I like that :)
weaselone
Boston Herald’s front page headline is: OBAMAGATE
Thoughtful David
@Baud: This.
If there’s any intelligent tactician in the Republican leadership, he has to surely realize that it would rile the opposition. You want to make sure every non-white and non-Republican in the country comes out and votes against you (except Alan West)? Try to impeach Obama. The turnout would be huge, and it wouldn’t be in favor of the Rs.
Baud
@weaselone:
It’s an accurate title. The only real scandal in the Village is that Obama was elected and reelected president.
Kay
@weaselone:
This is the Toledo Blade FP:
HOWEVER. There was a letter to the editor yesterday where the writer was screaming that they won’t cover Benghazi.
He had all the Benghazi stories listed, and their page numbers. He sounded like a crazy person.
WereBear
Planet Wingnut, of course.
And the problem has gotten even worse when they have their own television station, radio stations, and pet pundits at every major newspaper.
The civilization-saving irony is that just as they swarmed all over the usual media, the NEW media, via the Internet, just keeps growing in popularity.
I hope that will save us.
Suffern ACE
@WereBear: nope. Worldnetdaily and Newsmax pretty much grantee that they’ll ruin the new media as well.
f space that
@Baud: That’s a risk I bet they will be willing to make. Hope I am wrong. Democrats should never forget that every Democratic POTUS since JFK has either been murdered or seriously ratfucked.
Matt McIrvin
I suppose the other side of the coin is that there’s a sense in which the Republicans may have actually won the Clinton impeachment nonsense: though it backfired on them in a big way in the midterm, they hurt the administration’s brand just enough that it might have gotten the 2000 election into the danger zone where they could eke out/contrive a win for Bush.
And I’ve talked to people too young to remember the 1990s clearly who think that Clinton was actually convicted and removed from office, so maybe it doesn’t matter in the long run whether they can actually do it or not.
weaselone
@Kay:
The easy answer is not necessarily and incorrect one. I’m beginning to think that Anne Coulter’s book regarding liberalism as a mental illness was a case study in projection.
Matt McIrvin
@Joey Maloney: I think that if Biden actually became President as a result of this, he’d be about a hundred times as aggressive as, say, Al Gore about political payback. It’s almost something I’d want to see.
Suffern ACE
@Matt McIrvin: not really. It would mean that enough senators had defected that conviction was a possibility. That’s a lot of your own caucus deciding that the president needed to be removed. He’d be spending more time trying to put his own party back together and his ability for payback would be mooted.
Kay
@weaselone:
It is a deeply held belief on the far Right that Obama is a criminal. It’s really that simple. They express it in a lot of ways.
A popular theory is no one has prosecuted him because he is black, for example, but it is real. Impeachment wouldn’t be shocking to them, because they think his entire Presidency is a long series of unlawful acts.
There’s a county in Ohio, Wood County. It’s a “swing” county, a “bellweather”, so people lok at it to see who is going to win presidential elections. Some idiot national internet person on the Right put forth this theory that there were MORE VOTES COUNTED THAN PEOPLE in Wood County in 2012. But his numbers were insane. He had like 200k more people in the county than there ARE in the county. The local GOP base believed it. They live there! They KNOW there aren’t that many people there!
The county bd of elections had to specifically rebut it, because it had absolutely caught fire.
Loviatar, Firebagger
@mclaren:
Like you said, the Obots are Republicans in all but name and target of aggression. I guess we should be happy that sometimes they happen to be on the right side of the argument.
In a sane American political world, Obama would have run for office as a Republican who happened to be black. Its what his policy decisions have proven him to be.
The Other Bob
Impeaching Obama sounds like a great diversity/outreach strategy for the Republicans.
Hoodie
One of the fascinating things about the Obama era is how the behavior of American right is mirroring that of the eastern european communists described by authors like Kundera. The emphasis on outlandish conspiracies against a real America, the blatant and public forgetting of relatively recent events, and the indulgence in kitsch, such as tricorner hats, tea bags, and Gadsen flags. I guess it’s understandable that a good portion of the republican base would believe an impeachment show trial.
Omnes Omnibus
@Loviatar, Firebagger: Burn it all down, right?
Loviatar, Firebagger
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, just promote and try to pass Democratic policies instead of Republican Policies (Obamacare, Chained CPI, no jail time for financial crimes, Guantanamo Bay, persecution of whistleblowers)
Omnes Omnibus
@Loviatar, Firebagger: So you are changing your tune back from just wanting everyone to share the pain?
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: Must be back on the meds.
Cassidy
So is this whole “we’re really Republicans” thing the new firebagger meme? Is it an exercise in self actualization or just another talking point? Either way, I can’t imagine the remarkable lack of self-esteem and confidence in one’s own principles that must exist to try and fabricate that argument.
Yatsuno
@Cassidy: Democrat means exactly what Loviatar decides it means, nothing more and nothing less. And he is the final arbiter of the definition and it can never be questioned. Isn’t certitude adorable?
Cassidy
@Yatsuno: Gotcha. We’re in that period of history where words no longer have meaning.
StringOnAStick
@Southern Beale:
Yes. Yes it is. Aurora is not the happiest part of the Denver area.
LongHairedWeirdo
Just one thing to consider:
The Republicans aren’t really responding to their “base”. They’re responding to their outrage engine. Their base doesn’t care about “Benghazi”. Most of them probably don’t even know what the fuck it is.
But they’ve raised it up as a BIG DEAL, and made it sound so awful that they think they can keep on playing it for points, until there’s really no choice but to do something stupid like attempt impeachment.
It’s not quite their base – it’s their strategy, see.
It’s like, they’d been warmongering against Iraq forever. Once they had a chance to pull off an invasion, they had two choices – either go big and invade, or admit they’d been talking out their ass for all those years. Well, when it comes to suffering personal humiliation, or being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, there’s really no choice to that kind of person.
Matt McIrvin
@Patrick: During the Bush years, I remember hearing some Republicans all excitedly agreeing that Clinton had been a traitor because of something to do with China. I couldn’t even figure out what to do with China had been Clinton’s great transgression (in hindsight, it was probably about the allegations of undue influence in financing the 1996 campaign, the Buddhist temple fundraiser and all that). But it seemed obvious to all of them; they were in a universe in which, when somebody mentioned Clinton’s perfidy in re China, the context was clear to all.
Matt McIrvin
@Suffern ACE: Yeah, I guess the Senate supermajority requirement for an actual conviction means that there’s no way to spin such an event as anything other than a serious blow. It also makes it far less likely, of course.
Catsy
@mclaren:
Stopped reading there; laughing too hard. Forget your meds this morning?
Tk
@max:
What he said. Fuck those racist, fascist, fuckfaces. I’m itching to for one to get in my face. Or step up. Or whatever it’s called nowadays. I’m older now from my peak badassness but still a badass.
Tk
@max:
What he said. Fck those racist, fascist, asshats. . I’m itching to for one to get in my face. Or step up. Or whatever it’s called nowadays. I’m older now from my peak badassness but still a badass.
Pap Finn
If these Neo-Confederate animals actually try to impeach a second Democratic president in a row, let’s just skip the whole disgraceful circus and move on to negotiating a two-state solution.
I’m not joking. At all.
TheWatcher
@Joey Maloney: Actually, it worked out fine for the Republicans, as Gore was ‘stained’ by the Clinton taint, and so naturally we had to ‘let the grownups back in charge’ by the 2000 ‘election’. That is the exact plan they are following now.
Jack Hughes
For the Republicans, it’s 24/7/365/4D total political war.
Up against that rigid party discipline, deceptive propaganda and utterly credulous corporate media is a Democratic Party embarrassed to exhibit any sign of partisanship
When Democrats head for the hills at the first sign of the Republicans’ manufactured controversies, it only serves to validate Republican propaganda.
The Democrats are a political party in name only.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@pluege:
transgressions????? Hardly. the IRS has every reason to believe conservatives are cheating, or attempting to cheat on the requirements of 501c tax exempt. They were doing their job.
Obama should announce that he’s committing the resources to investigate *all* the political action groups for IRS violations.
Then watch the conservatives squirm trying to avoid the very real possibility that some of their groups *were* playing fast and loose.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@f space that:
2014 is a base election,we will hear about nothing but Benghazi and IRS for the next 2 years, unless something else happens.
So it’ll be the “Chinese Democracy” of election issues?
yeah, that’ll work out well for them…