In his May 12th Daily Beast column, Mike Tomasky says that “the idea of impeaching Obama is industrial-strength insane. Republicans will probably try anyway”
Here’s his analysis:
When the histories of this administration are written, I hope fervently that last Friday, May 10, does not figure prominently in them. But I fear that it might: the double-barrel revelations that the White House hasn’t quite been telling the whole story on Benghazi and that some mid-level IRS people targeted some Tea Party groups for scrutiny are guaranteed to ramp up the crazy. But to what extent? I fear it could be considerable, and the people in the White House damn well better fear the same, or we’re going to be contemplating an extremely ugly situation come 2015, especially if the Republicans have held the House and captured the Senate in the by-elections.
…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. Most Republican members of the House live in districts where it is a given (among the white constituents, anyway) that Obama is a socialist; that’s he bent on bringing the United States of America down, or at least that he definitely doesn’t love the country and the Constitution (nudge nudge) the way they do; that he’s not a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office to start with. …
… there is no end to Republican figures–and to a distressing extent, the mainstream media–feeding the crazy. [Republicasns] 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. ….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
Tomasky’s right and before any Democrat dares to disagree with him and say “Oh, they’ll never really go That far” they should just stop and think about how many times they’ve said the same thing before in the last five years and been utterly and totally wrong.
