RUTHFULLY YOURS

Conservatives and Republicans would be unwise to pursue President Obama’s impeachment as my colleague Bruce Walker today argues.  The odds are the effort would backfire, and there is a much more important goal that should be at the center of our political strategy: sweeping Democrats out of office in 2014 and 2016 in numbers sufficient to enact structural reforms, including replacement of the tax system and junking the IRS and outlawing public employee unions. President Obama is handing his opponents the means, if only they have the wit to pursue the bigger goal.

In politics, as in comedy, timing is everything. We have almost a year and a half until the midterms, three and a half until the presidential election. We can expect Obama to remain the worst crisis manager ever, making every mistake in the textbooks.  He has already nudged a critical mass of MSM players out of playing defense for him and aggressively joining the hunt for the truth. Generations of journalists have longed for another Watergate, and here we have a president caught looking positively Nixonian.  

Nixon, at least, had experience with a hostile press. Obama is so clueless that he thinks sending his spokesmen out to lie in the face of evidence or to claim “the law is irrelevant” might work, instead of making matters worse. One can only conclude that the truth must be highly damaging, and that, as the hoariest cliché of modern politics goes, the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

Congressional Democrats face a serious quandary. The most important single constituency of the party, blacks, provides, and will demand of their office holders, continuing overwhelming support for President Obama. But they risk losing other support if they make excuses for or try to obstruct discovery of what looks like a pervasive pattern of political abuse aimed at winning an election.

Our focus must be on getting out the truth, gathering evidence and accumulating a clear picture of who did what, with subpoenaed documents and sworn testimony.  There is every sign there is plenty more to come when it comes to evidence of political abuse, some of it crossing the lines of legality.  In the process of discovery, it is easy for process crimes to occur (ask Scooter Libby) and for the squeeze to be put on people implicated in conspiracy to obstruct justice or other process crimes. THey reveal who told them what to do. You follow the evidence upward. It takes time.

And that’s a good thing. Let Obama and his Democrat allies stew in the juices of scandal. We need to put them on the spot, forcing them to either tie their future to Obama, a sinking ship, or declare themselves on the side of truth and the American People. Sooner or later, some Democrats will break with the president and try to save their own skins b y supporting the inquiries. Somewhere along the line, Hillary and Obama will start behaving like  two scorpions in a bottle, desperate to escape blame for the Benghazi slaughter and lies. Then we start to see the Democratic Party split.  The Clintons have a lot of tools at their disposal. Perhaps we will even learn where Obama was the night of 9/11/12. 

If impeachment is to be raised, and I don’t rule it out in the long run, it will have to be a bipartisan affair. Otherwise, Obama will become a martyr to crazed Republicans, out to lynch-by-impeachment the first black president, and race relations will be further shattered. If no Democrats jump ship, then bypassing the opportunity to put Biden in the White House will be the order of the day. Does anyone think he would do a better job?  Obama is terrible president, to be sure, but we have to not just get rid of him but undo the damage he and the progressives have wrought during his presidency and before.

We already see the excuses being made for Obama: he is President Passerby, so detached from his job that things just got out of hand. David Axelrod’s remark that the government is just too big to control is precisely the point we need to drive home.

Above all, Republicans should avoid being seen as out to get Obama. As we saw in the case of the Clinton impeachment, a good talker like Clinton or Obama can turn the tables on those who appear to be zealous enemies operating out of animus.