Ah, but this is as good an opportunity as any to admit I was pretty much dead wrong about this one. I thought someone would formally introduce articles of impeachment against Barack Obama long ago. Not that they would actually go ahead an impeach him.
I will note that my prediction wasn't just "someone" -- I picked Michele Bachmann. Which, granted, wasn't really a wild stretch, but it turns out she's one of the group gunning for Holder. So I'm not entirely, totally wrong. Just missed the target. And the date, by three years. And they're not even picking a symbolic date, at least as far as I know. And she's apparently not even the lead on it. So, really, well, that's pretty bad predicting.
OK, as predictions go, this one wasn't entirely, well, scientific. Just having a little fun. But, alas (or not I suppose), wrong.
Good predictions? As of today, that goes to commenter Drew:
I'll be the contrarian and say that none of them will, barring any significant crime (which I strongly doubt will happen).A tentative congratulations to Drew. Nice work!
And congratulations, also tentative but so far, to the GOP House leadership for somehow keeping anyone from filing impeachment against the president.
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ReplyDeleteIt does seem like Impeachment proceedings against the President would probably backfire, maybe not enough to have a large electoral effect, but I wouldn't doubt that ushering in a new GOP conference in 2014 will bring the calls back out. Also I wonder if there's a bit of sit back and let Obamacare be the story for a while, until it's fixed or not.
ReplyDeleteProceeding against Obama would be stupid.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I think Holder (mainly for oppression of the press) and Clapper (for repeatedly lying under oath to Congress) are worthy of Impeachment proceedings.
In addition to my surprise at having made a sort of accurate political prediction, I'm fairly taken aback that I've been reading PB for this long.
ReplyDeleteBut there's no way this holds until January 2017 right? At some point as his term winds down, when doing so is just a meaningless symbolic gesture, somebody will take a stab at impeachment. The individual incentives are too great and the risk nonexistent for enough GOP reps that someone will make a go of it.
Is that a new winning prediction? Time will tell.
DeleteWhat does it indicate the some of the biggest GOP goofs are planning to do this? Is this a rogue operation or a sanctioned one?
"oppression of the press"
ReplyDeleteUh... that's... that's not a thing.
Don't have time to find and cite all the details (James Rosen is one example. cited in the article Jonathan references), but DOJ has been, let us say, extremely aggressive in going after the press and leakers. Even non-nutty far-righties could reasonably consider this a serious infringement of the 1st Amendment.
DeleteIf Rosen had simply said the North Koreans are likely to conduct an atomic test, everyone would have ignored it. By going out of his way to point out that US intelligence got the information from "a North Korean source" (which the public really didn't need to know), he probably got that source killed and probably convinced other potential sources to keep their mouths shut. Rosen is an idiot and deserves what he gets.
DeleteThe First Amendment protects speech from idiots and speech one doesn't like. It even protects speech by you. :-)
DeleteDon't have time to find and cite all the detail
DeleteColor me convinced. Impeach away!
I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? "Google". For example,Google "DOJ journalists". The 2nd match (at least for me) is a long Wikipedia article with plenty of references. The 3rd match is a "War on Journalists"article. By that right-wing nutcase blog, the Daily Kos.
DeleteActually, now that I think about it, absolutely nothing happened to Rosen.
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