AP PHOTO/PAUL SANCYA
Enter
chines off of a cliff can be exciting.
The recent uptick in impeachment prattle can basically be
attributed to a number of factors. First, the whole “August
doldrums” phenomenon. Congress is out of session, members
are occasionally encountering
the low-infos at town hall meetups, and eventually some gobemouche inspires someone to muse
half-heartedly on the prospects
of deposing the Kenyan-Muslim
usurper with the Constitutional
nuke. Bored reporters, gambling
that “impeachment” will be a fertile search term, let the stories leg
out, and eventually we get a nice
“trend piece” triad, which officially makes impeachment a Thing.
The second factor involved
here is that this is just the natural course of life when you leave a
bunch of legislators, unhappy with
an election result, all alone with
nothing but their lack of a cogent
policy strategy and their own nihilism to keep them company.
But the thing about impeachment is that you kind of have to
have a crime of some sort with
which to work. Back in the early
part of this year, the IRS’ kerfuffle
seemed like it might do the trick.
The use of the taxman to bedevil
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
09.01-08.13
What the idea lacks in
merit, it more than makes
up for in being sort of
exciting, in the way that
daft people launching
homemade flying machines
off of a cliff can be exciting.
one’s political enemies is, after
all, the stone-ground essence of
an impeachable offense. But as
actual facts emerged, the whole
“White House directed the IRS to
crush the Tea Party” eventually
became, “Someone at the IRS had
what sounded like a good idea to
improve workflow that ended up
being a stupid idea.” And the “targets” of the stupid idea ended up
being organizations of all sorts of
political persuasions.
No one in Washington was particularly inclined to argue in favor
Republican
Congressman
Kerry
Bentivolio’s
desire to
have Obama
impeached
goes against
U.S. law,
historical
precedent
and good
reason.