"Lust For Impeachment"

E.J. Dionne, Jr., writes today that, given the madness gripping the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party, talk of President Obama's impeachment cannot be taken lightly:

Yes, Democrats are happy to use the danger that the House will go there, by way of dramatizing the GOP’s refusal to work with Obama on issue after issue and the right wing’s open hatred for a president they cast simultaneously as a power-hungry lawbreaker and a weak steward of the nation’s interests. But the underlying cause is a breakdown among conservatives of the norms and habits that governing requires in a system of separated powers.  

The last time the country reelected a Democratic president, House Republicans impeached him despite strong public opposition. With many in the ranks already clamoring for a replay of those glory days, it’s fair to wonder if Boehner will hold fast and resist the impeachment crowd this time. His record in facing down his right wing is not encouraging.  (our emphasis)

Between their utter ignorance of Constitutional law and the din from their lizard-brained, tea bagger base, Republicans have already demonstrated the capacity for making the most outrageous threats and taking the most extreme actions when it comes to this President, as Dionne demonstrates in his op/ed (including their lawsuit stunt, see posting below).

Salon's Kim Messick does a good job of analyzing the forces that have led the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party, and especially its most rabid purists, to this point:

Because the Tea Party — really just the most feverish and obdurate part of the Republican “base” — has decided that there are worse things than losing elections. Having been told for years that its resentments are righteous and that the righteous must give no quarter to the wicked — no compromises! no negotiations! — it has quite reasonably opted to stand on “principle” ( as Ted Cruz puts it) even if this means coming up short at the ballot box. To put this point just a bit differently, it no longer thinks of governing as its primary purpose. It would like to govern, of course; it has an agenda, one it longs to enact; but its principal concern is to preserve its identity as the last redoubt of “pure” Americanism.

Messick notes the forces at play:

The party is now riven into three parts: a donor class that, like the rank-and-file, mainly wants to win elections and to govern the country in a (relatively) responsibly conservative way; a ferocious cell of right-wing fabulists that prefers defeat to the slightest modulation in its hatred of the modern world; and a network of entertainers and “journalists” with an entrepreneurial investment in promoting the second group at the expense of the first. 

That's why Dionne and many of us remain dubious that this impeachment contagion can be isolated; there are just too many carriers, too many interested in keeping the rhetoric amped up for these yahoos to be satisfied with a lawsuit that's not likely to do any damage to the President.