Hot, hot air

I get what John Boehner says, and he's likely right: the Democrats are using this silly impeachment talk to recharge their base and ring up the bucks. He's right, and it's worked. He says the Democrats are the ones doing all the talking, not him, not them. 

That's where he's wrong. Ms. Sarah Palin probably didn't start it, but she didn't let the Democrats do all the talking. She's the one who made headlines; and, lest we forget, should John McCain have won the 2008 Presidential election, Ms. Sarah, who didn't even complete her first term as Governor of Alaska, was just a heartbeat away from being POTUS, as they say in Washington. How does this sound? "President Sarah Palin." 

Here's the ex-gov:  

It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment. The many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.

Last time I checked, Ms. Palin wasn't a Democrat.


And then there was Rep. Steve Scalise's (R-La.), who, it seemed, even when pushed, would not answer the question Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday kept asking--"Will you consider impeaching the president?" He, like Boehner, kept telling Wallace that it was a Democratic ploy. But he never really said no, which means, of course, that he kept the notion alive--and he's the new House Majority Whip, not an also-ran.

Republicans have been talking impeachment--and big-name Republicans too.

And now my own rep, Steve King, promises Breitbart kick-starting the impeachment process if Obama does anything to change the status of undocumented workers, including, I guess, doing something about all those kids who've come across the border. King, you might remember, says lots of them are drug runners and you can tell because they have calves like cantaloupes. But then, he thinks of the headlines he gets as virtues, as do lots of Iowa voters, I guess, 80-some per cent of Sioux County.

And now it turns out that yet another Iowan, Joni Ernst, this one not yet in the House, several months ago already told a like-minded Des Moines audience that impeachment was definitely a way of dealing with Obama and actually called him a "dictator." Really? It's nice to know that our reps are unified, I guess. She and King will make a great pair, working for all of Iowa in Washington. 

It's nutty, and it's awful. It's a combustible mixture of hate and hot air, and I honestly don't get it. 

Recent poling determined that 57 percent of Republicans, a clear majority, would like to impeach President Barack Obama for what the constitution labels 'high crimes and misdemeanors."  More than half. Of course, what percentage of Republicans believed he was born in some foreign country and therefore ineligible to be President?  Wasn't that number somewhere in the forties too? Dream on.

I never was a Clinton fan, but I thought his impeachment process regrettable. "I never had sex with that woman" was a bald-faced lie, but impeachable? The Republicans ended up losing big-time, just as they'll lose big time on this one.

Besides, catting around with an intern is small potatoes when compared to what we've lost in Iraq--thousands of Americans, many thousands of Iraqis, gadzillions of dollars. A case can be made, and has, by those who don't have political leanings, that our invasion of Iraq upset the Middle Eastern apple cart even more fully than it was. There's dominoes there, and they're spilling all over the region.

If anyone committed some kind of national travesty, George W did. But nothing he did was either high crime or misdemeanor. He had the Congress on his side. He and his VP developed the case, and, for the most part, we all bought it. Maybe the American electorate--me included--should be impeached.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that political life in this country could get any worse. It's not hard to worry nowadays; if, as some say, tragedy unites and politics divide, then we are going to have to suffer big-time before somehow we learn once more to get along.