One of the guest bloggers over at Balloon Juice was lamenting the prospect that the Tea Party will make gains in the House and even retake control of the Senate in the 2014 mid-term elections later this year, and if they do, will waste no time in setting about implementing efforts to impeach Obama:
Listening to NPR and watching MSNBC, and occasionally Fox “news” this last week, I am convinced that the 2014 mid-terms will be Obama’s third presidential election.
The teabaggers, who make up the main power block in the modern Republican party, aim to win the Senate and then impeach the President on any grounds they can think up. They have been rather open about this, and they have repeatedly stated this to be their intention to anyone they think might support them. I don’t think, given what I’ve been seeing and hearing, that I am writing hyperbole here. Given the chance, they will remove this president from office by any means available to them. Anyone who lives in a deep red state can tell you that these people are absolutely serious.http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/02/08/obamas-third-presidential-election/
Believe it or not dear readers, in a perverse sort of way, The Gadfly actually hopes such a situation comes to pass. Oh - and not just that they will try to impeach Obama - the hope is that they will succeed - and for good reason.
Allow The Gadfly to expound further.
The Gadfly is old enough to remember, quite vividly, what happened the last time radical and hypocritical elements of the conservative movement tried to impeach a popularly elected Democratic President - namely one William Jefferson Clinton, on what appeared to a vast majority of the public, purely partisan political reasons.
While you will not find The Gadfly defending Mr. Clinton's personal behavior and sexual peccadilloes, you also will not find The Gadfly copping to the conservative's braying, then and now, that Clinton's zeal to keep his personal sex life from the prying and creepy eyes of a bunch of bible-thumping, stone-throwing hypocrites the likes of Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston and Dan Burton, arose to the level of impeachment as outlined in the Constitution:
The U.S. Constitution in Article I, Sections 2 and 3, which discuss the procedure, and in Article II, Section 4, which indicates the grounds for impeachment: “the President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0764613.html
And since Clinton's transgressions did not involve treason or bribery, it was left up to Congressional Republicans to prove that the act of lying about a blow job met the general and historical definition of the term "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Take a look at any reputable historian's analysis of the Clinton impeachment affair. The overwhelming consensus is that the Republican's attempt at impeachment, which they knew full well had absolutely zero chance of succeeding, was very clearly a partisan political attack that had as it's primary goal the forced resignation of President Bill Clinton. There simply is no way to explain with a straight face, how it is that a shitty little investigation in to an innocuous, failed Arkansas land deal that the Clinton's, as it turned out, were actually found to be victims of, morphed magically in to a zealous witch hunt of Mr. Clinton's past and present sexual proclivities and relationships. The crowning piece of evidence supporting the partisan political angle of the whole deal was when, after the impeachment failed, the Republican impeachment managers (the four frauds listed above), against the advice of wiser and more moderate Republicans, released the entire Starr report to the press and the public. The report contained every lurid detail, many which were later themselves investigated and found to be embellished, that Starr and his panty-sniffing detectives had purportedly uncovered during their investigation.
And all for what? The end result of the conservative sexual witch hunt of Bill Clinton was that Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval ratings of any President (68%) since WWII. He was also, btw, the last President to leave office with a budget surplus (but that is a whole other discussion).
And that dear readers is why The Gadfly truly hopes that the right-wing, teabagging conservanuts achieve their wet dream of impeaching and removing Obama from office. It would an epic act of political suicide on a mass scale.
In fact -- it worked so fucking well the first time, that the likely outcome of them doing it again will result in their political party and ideological movement being consigned to the same shithole of historical dumbassery where the impeachment of Clinton presently festers in malodorous perpetuity. It will assuredly cause them to lose the growing demographic of minority voters for a generation, and quite likely the woman and independent vote along with it. It will turn the presently complaisant press against them and earn them the enmity that they have deserved all along. Basically it will be the conservative version of Napolean's blunderous Waterloo.
And quite frankly dear readers, if you ask The Gadfly, anything that has, as the end result, the modern-day conservative movement being exiled in to national obscurity for a couple of decades, cannot be all that bad of a thing.
----TFG
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