Impeachment Not On The Table…Yet…Maybe Never

Moe Lane goes into why Republicans shouldn’t be so quick to holler for the impeachment of President Obama.

The trick, of course, is to not over-focus on the man at the top.  It’s the President’s political appointees and (mostly union) allies in the bureaucracies that have to go, of course: Barack Obama will be walking out the door on January 20, 2017 any which way*.  As for hastening Obama’s Walk of Shame: the major problem with impeachment is that it leads inexorably to “Joe Biden? President of the United States? Good God!” – remember, in the 1990s Al Gore was not yet widely considered to be quite mad – which means that an unsuccessful impeachment attempt would be worse than both a successful impeachment attempt, and no impeachment attempt at all. In fact, the goal here is not to make it personal, period. Speaker John Boehner put it pretty well, I think: “Asked at a Thursday press conference if he still trusts the president, Boehner responded, “It’s not about trusting someone. Our job here is to get to the truth, and we’re going to get to the truth. And I know what you’re up to. I’m not taking the bait.””

I know, I know: you’re personally offended by this White House. So am I. You want the whole sorry lot of them to, as Robert Ludlum vividly put it once, to end up cleaning urinals in Cairo.

As bad as I hate to say it, Mr. Lane is right. If we proceed to go after Obama instead of the people he appointed over the various agencies involved in these scandals, we will waste any political gains we’ve made in the ensuing months. And we will give the Progressives ammo to use in the next two election cycles.

Actually, Pete Ingemi, Da Tech Guy had already pointed this out a few days ago. Liberal commentators have been broaching the subject of impeachment, but Pete says it’s a trap and not to fall for it;

Back during the Nixon era while I was still a pre-teen infatuated with history and had not yet discovered a certain scarf wearing Madman in a box I would rush home from school and watch the Watergate hearings wondering what might happen next.  Like the people who today think of Watergate as something that was practically destined to be I didn’t understand how many things took place behind the scenes that facilitated Nixon downfall particularly the skilled moves by the Democrats in the house.

Fortunately for people interested in these things Tip O’Neill included an informative chapter in his autobiography Man of the House that detailed not only the twists and turns that led lead him as Democrat Majority Leader at the time, to suspect that the Nixon administration was up to no good in terms of political intimidation but of the right decisions made by the congress and the wrong decisions by the administration that led to their own downfall.

It is almost a handbook as to what to do and what to avoid in a similar situation…

…and that brings us to the Obama administration and the IRS.

As a criminal investigation begins we’ve seen some  the “I” word, Impeachment thrown about.

Now a lot of that is on twitter, but that’s no big deal, a lot of words are thrown about on twitter, but some of it has been thrown around in the press.

The funny thing is a lot of the people doing so are of the left,

This is not an accident, the left understand that talk of impeachment now would be a disaster, not to the president, but to those building the case against him.

As Tip O’Neill notes public opinion led the congress on impeachment.  Democrats were hesitant to move forward until polls showed otherwise.

Now we of course have a different environment today.  Instead of a Republican president attacked by a democrat press and generally friendly to the Democrat majority,  you have a Democrat press who has traditionally defended Barack Obama that dislikes the GOP majority in the house.

This is all the more reason to let the public get there first.  The congress HAS to be perceived as investigating facts.  If the facts continue to go where the evidence seems to be pointing the public will demand action.

Politics is serious business, like war or playing high stakes poker. “You have to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away and know when to run,”  to borrow a phrase from that famous Kenny Rogers song.

And here’s some musings by Stacy McCain;

But no matter what the polls say — low-information voters care more about celebrity mastectomies than about politics — it’s obvious the administration is lying about pretty much everything. For example, IRS officials tried to blame the problems on an alleged “surge” in non-profit applications that didn’t actually happen, and this bogus rationale was offered via a dishonest ruse that they lied about.

OK, so if the first public excuse was a lie,  and we then learn that this was revealed via a phony set-up question, and if every new fact we discover — “Tell us about your prayer meetings” — tends to make the situation seem worse . . . Well, what would we know if we knew everything?

We don’t know, and thus we must be cautious in asserting that we’ve found the “smoking gun” that will result in federal indictments, the resignation of a half-dozen Cabinet secretaries, perp walks for White House staffers and the Impeachment of the President.

On the other hand, when the best excuse Obamaphiles like Ashley Banfield can come up with is that the President of the United States doesn’t know anything about anything and his administration is plagued by rampant stupidity, we should probably keep asking questions.