Five or six years into a president’s term, I guess that you can expect some segment of the opposition to believe that a case can be made for their impeachment, but I’m hard-pressed to come up with a rationale in President Obama’s case. The best I can come up with is that he intervened in Libya without seeking congressional approval. Other than that, he is guilty of no more than any American president would be guilty of. In fact, compared with any president since John F. Kennedy, there is markedly less to indict this president with than we are accustomed to. There is no Vietnam War or Watergate or hostage crisis or Iran-Contra controversy or marital infidelity or war crimes to debate. There’s no perjury or drowning cities.
What the far right presents as an indictment is mainly a mass hallucination for which the proper response is “Good luck with your asparagus.”
In Iowa, the GOP is looking for someone to replace Sen. Tom Harkin, but their search is not going well. One of their candidates, Air Force veteran Sam Clovis, thinks that Obama would be impeached if he weren’t the son of a black man. The fact that this man makes sense to a big part of the Republican base is an indictment of the entire conservative movement.
In an interview with the Daily Times Herald, Clovis, who did not provide reasons for why the president would be vulnerable to impeachment, said the media would cover the issues surrounding such proceedings differently with a black president than a white one with the same record.
“It’s not that what he has done would not rise to the level where it might be impeachable,” Clovis said. “I don’t think it’s a practical, pragmatic issue. And simply because I don’t think the nation is ready for it.”
This is what passes for being reasonable in conservative circles today.
