President Obama is not running for re-election in November. But he is running against impeachment.
Does that sound crazy? Perhaps, but it’s entirely plausible.
I know the President has committed no “high crimes or misdemeanors.” But try and tell that to the Republican base. They have invented their own litany of impeachable offenses, and are repeating them to each other in a rising chorus. It’s an old propaganda device: repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. The truth as they know it, anyway.
I was startled yesterday when someone on TV (I forget who) pointed out that if the Republicans win control of the Senate and keep control of the House in November, they will try to impeach the President.
It might sound laughable to you and me. But it’s the kind of reality today’s Republicans embrace.
And if they have the votes to impeach President Obama, that’s what they will do.
It would be a great shame if this president were to be impeached – this well-meaning man, who seeks only fairness and brotherhood, whose personal life is irreproachable, whose policies have been designed only for the promotion of a better society, whose greatest crime is the creation of a system intended to provide affordable health care for all Americans.
Or perhaps his greatest crime is something else entirely. Perhaps it’s the color of his skin that offends.
The impeachment talk rings ominously with code words suggesting just that.He is falsely accused of being an outsider – born in Kenya (or Indonesia), brought up as a Muslim, imbued with Marxist ideas … all of it portraying him as not only un-American but anti-American. And none of it true.
Ugly epithets rain down upon his head, false accusations fill the airwaves. New “scandals” are concocted daily in a relentless crusade to discredit him.
And what has he done, really?
He has decried economic injustice, pleaded for the protection of the environment, urged Americans to give their children a good education and accept one another despite such differences as race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. And he has worked diligently to protect us from terrorists.
These are the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that warrant impeachment?
These are the sins that have evoked such hatred? Such personal hatred?
You have to wonder why so many Republican politicians are calling for his “execution.” Why a little old lady at a town hall meeting in Oklahoma would denounce him as “an S.O.B.”
I ponder his presidency, the good and the bad, the triumphs and the failures, the amazing achievements despite the unprecedented obstructionism, and I can find no crimes, no misdemeanors.
I am left with the depressing conclusion that to these Americans, Barack Obama’s real crime is being President while black.
