Tom coburn obama impeachment
Tom coburn obama impeachment, As an assignment for the magazine here, I recently spent a couple of months marinating on the events of 1998, when we saw only the second impeachment of a president in the history of the Republic, which came about mainly because the Republican party refused to recognize the legitimacy of a Democratic president, and because that same party had the votes in the House of Representative to bring the action forward, which it did, in a lame duck session, after the country had told the Republicans in no uncertain terms through that year's midterm elections that they should knock this shit off.
Also, because the president was incomprehensibly reckless in his personal life, but that was a minor factor. I found myself astonished all over again at the sheer vandalism of the whole project, at the heedless damage the Republicans did to the country because they quite simply couldn't stop themselves, nor did they particularly want to do so.
By 2000, it should be noted, nobody at that year's Republican convention even mentioned the impeachment of the president, let alone bragged about it. All that high-flown -- and incredibly bogus -- rhetoric about defending the Rule Of Law, and all those quotations from Robert Bolt's Thomas More, all of it went right down to the darkest depths of the memory hole.
I think those are serious things, but we're in serious times," Coburn said in Muskogee, Okla., when asked about impeachment. "And I don't have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,' but I think you're getting perilously close."
Remember, this isn't some back-bench featherhead bruiting this about. It's a (mysteriously) respected senator with whom the president is purportedly close friends. (Don't be fooled. The only reason Coburn isn't reckoned to be among the crunchiest nuts on the senatorial tree is that he shares the Oklahoma delegation with Jim Inhofe, who makes Coburn look like Pericles.) Coburn is going to get asked on the news programs to talk about what he said. This talk is now undeniably mainstreamed. OK, boys.
Bring it on.
This president isn't going to make it easier on you. There isn't going to be a personal scandal that you can gin up this time. I think you should proceed to hearings -- all of you fine old white people -- wherein you try to remove from office the first African American president in history for the high crimes of getting a law passed that you don't like. I think you should recall how everything except the Lewinsky stuff fell apart on Ken Starr, and then trot out the IRS and Benghazi, Benghazi! BENGHAZI! again on national television. I think this is a monumental political winner for your party. I think this may just lock things up for you the next 20 years. Go ahead. Give your slavering base what it really wants.
(You'll also note from the Tulsa newspaper that Coburn also called for a new constitutional convention -- aka The Second Worst Idea In Politics. Why you're hearing about it again now is that the delegates to The Second Worst Idea would be chosen by the various state legislatures where, at the moment, Republicans are running amok. The reason this is The Second Worst Idea is that the last time we did it, we threw out the entire system of government, and that was with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington running the show. I'm no raging Founder-phile, but that seems to me to be a better lineup than handing the job over to Tom Coburn, Mark Levin, and the inhabitants of monkeyhouses like the current Wisconsin and North Carolina state legislatures. Last time, we did it partly because of Shays Rebellion. This time, we'll do it because conservatives got beat on health-care with their own ideas.)
This should be the final put-up-or-shut-up moment. Either the party distances itself from this kind of loose talk, or it owns this kind of loose talk. This isn't something that ought to be thrown out there just to rev up the base for the midterms. As we learned in 1998, this kind of thing takes on a life of its own, and it's difficult to turn off once you engage it. Either the party reins in its base, and the people playing so loudly to it, like Tom Coburn, or it embraces the base as the ideological heart of the party. You can't middle this stuff any more. The stakes are too high.
Also, because the president was incomprehensibly reckless in his personal life, but that was a minor factor. I found myself astonished all over again at the sheer vandalism of the whole project, at the heedless damage the Republicans did to the country because they quite simply couldn't stop themselves, nor did they particularly want to do so.
By 2000, it should be noted, nobody at that year's Republican convention even mentioned the impeachment of the president, let alone bragged about it. All that high-flown -- and incredibly bogus -- rhetoric about defending the Rule Of Law, and all those quotations from Robert Bolt's Thomas More, all of it went right down to the darkest depths of the memory hole.
I think those are serious things, but we're in serious times," Coburn said in Muskogee, Okla., when asked about impeachment. "And I don't have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,' but I think you're getting perilously close."
Remember, this isn't some back-bench featherhead bruiting this about. It's a (mysteriously) respected senator with whom the president is purportedly close friends. (Don't be fooled. The only reason Coburn isn't reckoned to be among the crunchiest nuts on the senatorial tree is that he shares the Oklahoma delegation with Jim Inhofe, who makes Coburn look like Pericles.) Coburn is going to get asked on the news programs to talk about what he said. This talk is now undeniably mainstreamed. OK, boys.
Bring it on.
This president isn't going to make it easier on you. There isn't going to be a personal scandal that you can gin up this time. I think you should proceed to hearings -- all of you fine old white people -- wherein you try to remove from office the first African American president in history for the high crimes of getting a law passed that you don't like. I think you should recall how everything except the Lewinsky stuff fell apart on Ken Starr, and then trot out the IRS and Benghazi, Benghazi! BENGHAZI! again on national television. I think this is a monumental political winner for your party. I think this may just lock things up for you the next 20 years. Go ahead. Give your slavering base what it really wants.
(You'll also note from the Tulsa newspaper that Coburn also called for a new constitutional convention -- aka The Second Worst Idea In Politics. Why you're hearing about it again now is that the delegates to The Second Worst Idea would be chosen by the various state legislatures where, at the moment, Republicans are running amok. The reason this is The Second Worst Idea is that the last time we did it, we threw out the entire system of government, and that was with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington running the show. I'm no raging Founder-phile, but that seems to me to be a better lineup than handing the job over to Tom Coburn, Mark Levin, and the inhabitants of monkeyhouses like the current Wisconsin and North Carolina state legislatures. Last time, we did it partly because of Shays Rebellion. This time, we'll do it because conservatives got beat on health-care with their own ideas.)
This should be the final put-up-or-shut-up moment. Either the party distances itself from this kind of loose talk, or it owns this kind of loose talk. This isn't something that ought to be thrown out there just to rev up the base for the midterms. As we learned in 1998, this kind of thing takes on a life of its own, and it's difficult to turn off once you engage it. Either the party reins in its base, and the people playing so loudly to it, like Tom Coburn, or it embraces the base as the ideological heart of the party. You can't middle this stuff any more. The stakes are too high.
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