Mike Corrigan

By Mike Corrigan

BN Columnist

The Republicans would like to impeach President Obama. In fact, this is National Impeach Obama Week, according to the Tea Party. What a noble cause! And it isn’t only the Republican extreme right wing that wants to shower the President with calumny. Somewhat warped presidential timber Mike Huckabee said the President certainly should be impeached — if only somebody could come up with a sane reason. Rep. Steve King has an insane reason — Obama should be impeached for trading five terrorists for one American captive. And Fox News, the official network of the Tea Party, insists that Obama should be impeached just on general principle. Though the Constitution demands a specific reason, Fox can’t imagine why just hoping it can be done won’t make it so.

House Majority Leader John Boehner feels President Obama should be impeached for unilaterally changing a key part of the Affordable Care Act, to make the plan work better. Making a federal program more functional is obviously unconstitutional, Boehner argues, and making government work at all is itself against Republican principles. But when Boehner learned that every president since Eisenhower has issued similar executive orders, he decided to file a civil suit instead — which can’t win, either, but should keep the president’s lawyers busy until such time as the impeachment trials heat up. And keeping lawyers busy is what modern politics is for. That, and letting multinational corporations do whatever they want.

I will now suggest a wonderful impeachable offense for these Holy Seekers of the Impeachment Grail. The Republicans won’t try it, because George Bush set the precedent for it, and maybe Reagan before him — and besides, the GOP hopes to get in again and do the same thing themselves.

The impeachable offense, which violates international law, is this Orwellian idea of “preventive war.” George Bush practiced this in Iraq, and Barack Obama is extending the concept with his undeclared illegal drone warfare and with his continuing torture of uncharged terrorists, a practice that he pledged to end years ago. Obama’s drones have taken out American citizens and hundreds of innocent victims; he cites a need for pre-emption, with acceptable collateral damage. Acceptable, to whom? Under longstanding international doctrines, preventive war and assassination by drone without due process are both illegal.

Imperial murder, however, has a longstanding presidential precedent. The world court, in fact, found the U.S. guilty in 1983 of its actions against the duly-elected government in Nicaragua. Morning in America poster boy Ronnie Reagan is on the hook for that one. Verdict in, what did America do? Ronnie then doubled down, with Iran-Contra. And still he avoided impeachment! Our hero!

Today, there is a drumbeat afoot internationally to try members of the Bush administration for war crimes, for pursuing the disastrous War in Iraq under false pretenses, and for the U.S.’s subsequent enthusiastic torture program in violation of the Geneva Convention. Bush also should have been impeached.

Due to decades of turning both the public and private sectors over to the absolute rule of private interests, flooding the world with arms, fighting endless and illegal wars, crashing the world economy and then hoping very hard the world will fix itself, we now have seen six years of weak Democratic leadership, deliberately further undermined by the puerile obstructionism of the right. America drifts along, rudderless. Meanwhile, both parties try to take credit for what good news there is. Provided they can find any.

But rest assured, when America goes under for the third time, both Republicans and Democrats will finally do something.

They will point at the other party and scream, “It’s their fault!”

The News’s official position is that it’s all Mike’s fault. If he didn’t point out these “problems,” we could all just pretend everything is great, as always.