Politics

Unimpeachable

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

The blogger MyKeyStrokes writes an excellent piece trying to dissect the American right wing’s newfound, fruitless obsession with the idea of impeaching President Obama.

Yeah, that's not going to happen.
Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

Essentially, those elected GOP officials and conservative pundits who peddle this impeachment talk know that there is zero chance of making this outcome a reality – but of course, that was never their aim:

Sometimes politics is like high-stakes poker. If you look around the table after a few hands and you can’t tell who’s the pigeon, citizen, chances are it’s you: the guy who plunked down $26.95 for a book called Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office.

Yeah, you with the “Impeach Obama” bumpersticker on your car. The guy standing on a freeway overpass waving a “Honk for Impeachment” sign. You may as well go around in a little bird’s nest hat, like Donald Duck’s eccentric friend Gyro Gearloose.

Because it not only ain’t going to happen, but the people peddling this nonsense don’t even want it to happen. Not really. They’re just making a buck off people who can’t count and running a classic misdirection play.

Yes. Making a quick buck by whipping scared people into a furious rage, and then either selling them products that help to reinforce their End Times beliefs (Obama wants to destroy America! We are now a socialist country!) or leveraging their support to achieve higher political office.

As MyKeyStrokes sees it, however, this is potentially good news for any centrist or Democratic-leaning voter, because the more preoccupied the GOP becomes with the alluring mirage of seeing President Obama impeached, the more they inadvertently reveal that they have given up hope of passing any of their agenda (see the 40 pointless votes to repeal ObamaCare in the House of Representatives as just one shining example):

Like it or not, the possibility of repealing “Obamacare” ended when the Supreme Court found it Constitutional and the president won re-election. You’d think after 40 — count ’em, 40 — fruitless votes to abort the law, that message might start to sink in. We still have majority rule in this country.

But no, it hasn’t sunk in at all. Like a baseball team demanding to play the eighth game of the World Series, GOP hardliners have come up with yet another plan to force the president’s hand. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has called for something he infelicitously called a “grassroots tsunami” to make Obama relent.

Whether the GOP’s current malaise is a good or bad thing largely depends on one’s own political leanings, or the importance that one attaches to having a functioning two-party system where neither party is beholden to an intractable, crazy political base. Personally, as someone who advocates for smaller government and empowering the citizen over the state (and consequently very much against the recent assaults on the First and Fourth Amendments by the Bush and Obama administrations), I find it disheartening to find myself frequently having to side with Democrats because the other side are, more often than not, acting in a totally nihilistic, immature manner.

It was bad enough when this childish behaviour (“I didn’t get my way, so now I’m taking my toys and leaving, and refusing to cooperate or compromise in the business of government”) was limited to the House of Representatives, but now we see this reality-denial infecting the Senate as well. Both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are rising stars in the GOP, and both have some degree of promise. Certainly neither of them are stupid. And yet they both seek to burnish their conservative credentials by playing chicken with the US debt ceiling again, and failing to call out the crazies from among their supporters who have persuaded themselves to believe that a twice-elected president pursuing his political agenda is somehow akin to “high crimes and misdemeanors” worthy of impeachment:

At a recent town hall meeting in Muskogee, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, ostensibly a personal friend of the president’s, answered a constituent’s question about impeachment by allowing as how “those are serious things, but we’re in serious times. 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.”

Campaigning in Texas, Senator Cruz responded to a constituent who asked, “Why don’t we impeach him?” by saying, “It’s a good question.”

No. It isn’t a good question. It’s a dumb question. Ted Cruz graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and assuming he wasn’t high during his constitutional law lectures, understands perfectly well that Obama has not committed any impeachable offense any more than have the previous eight or so presidents.

cruzpalin

But impeachment is not the goal. The business of governing through compromise is not the goal. Even the full enactment of their declared conservative agenda is not the goal (Republicans will rail against dependence on government but would never risk the wrath of the AARP by voting to abolish the socialised medicine that is MediCare). So what is the goal?

Money and/or Political Power.

And all of those saps “honking to impeach” Obama are playing right into their hands.

On Dreams

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

On Wednesday 28th August 1963, nearly three hundred thousand people marched on Washington, D.C. for jobs and freedom, and Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech:

 

Fifty years later to the day, a black man holds the office of President of the United States, and spoke from the same spot to mark the anniversary of an event which was critical in ensuring the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

 

Among their other grievances and demands, the people who marched wanted the simple, unalienable dignity and civil right of being able to vote – to fully participate in the American democracy. I doubt many of them would have believed it had they been told that within fifty years, not only would black people in the South be able to vote freely without let or hindrance (more or less), but that a black presidential candidate would successfully run for the highest office in the land – and then win re-election in a landslide four years later.

As President Obama rightly noted in his remarks, much work remains to be done by those who, in their own ways, continue the march today. And in many ways, the issues that drew people to the National Mall on that day in 1963 – unemployment, living wages, equal access to justice, an end to discrimination – remain as intractable now as they were then.

But by God, we’ve come a long way.

On Political Interviews

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

How not to do it:

 

Wow. I will leave it to you to determine whether Chris Young was seriously running for mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, or auditioning for American Idol. Kudos to the interviewer for keeping a straight face throughout the excruciating, preachy song.

More on the Chris Young phenomenon here and here.

Somebody Stop Bill Kristol

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Apparently not content with having helped to inflict Sarah Palin on an unsuspecting, unprepared world back in 2008, unabashed neo-conservative Bill Kristol is now actively cheerleading for Palin to run for the US Senate in 2014, in the hopes that she can defeat incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Begich.

Kristol says:

I think the way Palin would possibly resurrect herself, if that’s the right word or rehabilitate herself, I guess is a better way of putting it — run for Senate in Alaska in 2014. I’m not urging that. I’m just saying, if I were her adviser, I would say, take on the incumbent, you have to win a primary, then you have to beat an incumbent Democrat, it’s not easy. But if she did that, suddenly, imagine that, Sarah Palin, freshman Senator in 2015 in Washington, having beaten an incumbent, that’d be pretty interesting.

Interesting? Really? How anyone with as little intellectual firepower as Sarah Palin occupying a seat in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body (TM) could be seen as “pretty interesting” is almost unfathomable. Awful, certainly, but not interesting in any way. Even otherwise intelligent and sane Republicans, such as Marco Rubio or Rand Paul, are set dead against the idea of compromise or governance of any kind. How would adding another entity with similar views (ObamaCare = worst thing ever, immigration reform must be stopped, let’s cut taxes but raise spending on defense and benefits for old people who vote) but no brain to justify them help matters at all?

Someone needs to get Dick Morris to predict a landslide Palin victory in a potential Senate contest with Mark Begich so I can sleep easier at night again.

On Criminal NSA Overreach

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Some very disturbing new findings about the extent to which the  US government uses the vast power of its surveillance apparatus to tackle suspected domestic crime. Of course, up until this point we had been reassured that the draconian collection of telecommunications metadata and the full-on tapping of telephone calls and online communications was used only to help prosecute the “War On Terror”. This has now been revealed to be a total sham.

Rachel Maddow breaks down the extent of this surreptitious, lawless activity on her show:

 

And Reuters reports:

Reuters has uncovered previously unreported details about a separate program, run by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, that extends well beyond intelligence gathering. Its use, legal experts say, raises fundamental questions about whether the government is concealing information used to investigate and help build criminal cases against American citizens.

The DEA program is run by a secretive unit called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Here is how NSA efforts exposed by Snowden differ from the activities of the SOD:

Purpose of the programs

NSA: To use electronic surveillance to help the Federal Bureau of Investigation catch terrorists, the U.S. military fight wars, and the Central Intelligence Agency collect intelligence about foreign governments.

SOD: To help the DEA and other law enforcement agents launch criminal investigations of drug dealers, money launderers and other common criminals, including Americans. The unit also handles global narco-terrorism cases.

So to be perfectly clear – the United States government has explicitly decided to allow this vast spying program to be turned inwards to aid local law enforcement in their daily mundane activities. According to the (already flimsy) assurances that we were given when Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA’s secret programmes, the spying apparatus was to be used only to seek out and intercept communications between non-US citizens that represented a terrorism threat. But it turns out that this is not the case. If an intelligence analyst happens to eavesdrop on your telephone call and finds out that you want to (hypothetically) buy some pot from your friendly local drug dealer, that information might then be surreptitiously passed on to the DEA, who could then come and raid your home. Based on intelligence which they have no right to be privy to.

But worst of all is this bombshell:

Disclosure to the accused

NSA: Collection of domestic data by the NSA and FBI for espionage and terrorism cases is regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. If prosecutors intend to use FISA or other classified evidence in court, they issue a public notice, and a judge determines whether the defense is entitled to review the evidence. In a court filing last week, prosecutors said they will now notify defendants whenever the NSA phone-records database is used during an investigation.

SOD: A document reviewed by Reuters shows that federal drug agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to conceal the SOD’s involvement. Defense attorneys, former prosecutors and judges say the practice prevents defendants from even knowing about evidence that might be exculpatory. They say it circumvents court procedures for weighing whether sensitive, classified or FISA evidence must be disclosed to a defendant.

Local and federal law enforcement officers are actually being trained – instructed – to cover up the fact that the evidence they use to come and arrest you was unlawfully shared by the folks at the NSA. Apparently the clinical, non-threatening term for this is “recreating the investigative trail”. So rather than going to court and admitting that your evidence against the accused came from an NSA tip-off based on illegal spying by the government, agents are encouraged to falsify the account of their investigations and potentially perjure themselves by stating on the record that it was their own brilliant deductive and crime-solving abilities which led to the arrest.

It is hard to adequately describe how foul, deceitful and criminal this behaviour really is.

There was no excuse for allowing the NSA to violate the fourth amendment protection against unreasonable or unwarranted searches when it pertained to potential terrorism. There is certainly no excuse for widening this harassment in aid of civilian law enforcement.

Semi-Partisan Sam says no. This oppressive “national security” apparatus must be rolled back, and those responsible for willfully violating the Constitution must face the legal consequences of their actions.