On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King jnr's I Have a Dream speech, Kerry Bentivolio, a Michigan congressman, has a dream, too: to impeach the nation's first black president.
“If I could write that Bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true,” the freshman Republican told a local GOP club meeting last Monday in Birmingham, Michigan, in a video posted on YouTube and reported by BuzzFeed.
Bentivolio graciously conceded that he’d have to come up with some grounds first. “I went back to my office and I have had lawyers come in,” he said.
"And these are lawyers, well – [with] PhDs in history. I said, 'Tell me how I can impeach the president of the United States. What evidence do you have?' You've got to have the evidence."
The Tea Party congressman, a member of the House oversight and government reform committee, hopes to find emails linking the White House to the Internal Revenue Service examination of groups with a "Tea Party" label seeking tax-exempt status.
"I stood 12ft away from the guy and listened to him, and I couldn't stand being there," he said of US president Barack Obama, "but because he is president I have to respect the office."
Unmoored from reality
Bentivolio is the perfect avatar of the impeachment fever gripping a GOP that's unmoored from reality, given that he once admitted in a court deposition, "I have a problem figuring out which one I really am, Santa Claus or Kerry Bentivolio." That's why he sometimes used the pronoun "we".
He’s been playing Santa Claus – as part of a business he started 19 years ago called Old Fashion Santa – with his own six reindeer.
"To project authenticity, he's even sought clearance from Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Mount Clemens to fly his sleigh in its airspace on Christmas Eve," Kathleen Gray wrote in the Detroit Free Press.
He told National Review that he takes being called crazy as a compliment, so "it didn't really bother me when people were saying, 'that guy's kooky because he has reindeer'. No, they're kooky because they don't have 'em."
Bentivolio also had a small role “in a low-budget independent film that seemed to suggest that 9/11 was an inside job”, said the magazine.
The Free Press reported that Bentivolio, no Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street, left a teaching job in 2011 "after complaints he bullied students, even telling one class on its first day that his goal was to make all the students cry once during the year".
How much more gratifying to bully the president.
Not content with fighting off a popular immigration overhaul or threatening to shut down the government and set off the first federal default, hard-core congressional Republicans want to nullify the election.
Unlike when the Republicans did their nutty impeachment of Bill Clinton – (Newt Gingrich is back, starring in the Crossfire reboot) – they don't even control the Senate. And as David Axelrod told me, there isn't a "scintilla of justification".
It’s lucky the president got another dog if Tom Coburn is his friend. At a town hall in Muskogee last Wednesday, when an audience member called the administration “lawless”, the Oklahoma senator said his buddy was “getting perilously close” to the standard of high crimes and misdemeanours.
“I wonder what Coburn is saying about his enemies,” said Axelrod dryly.
In Texas recently, another Republican congressman, Blake Farenthold, answered a birther at a town hall.
“If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, we would probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it,” he said, but added that it would never pass in the Senate.
At another Texas session last Monday, someone asked senator Ted Cruz (Rep-Canada) why they couldn't impeach Obama. "It's a good question," replied Cruz, before noting that Democrats control the Senate.
Earlier this month, the president’s motorcade pulled into the Orlando Hilton and was greeted by about 50 protesters with signs saying “Kenyan Go Home”, “Impeach Obama” and “Obama Lies”. BuzzFeed had a pictorial on the “Overpasses for Obama’s Impeachment” fad, where people hold up home-made signs on overpasses.
And they reported on 100,000 preorders for the book Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office, covering sore points from Benghazi to Obamacare.
This month has been rife with efforts among the GOP “wise men”, using every channel possible – polls, opinion editorials, cable, Twitter, to try to talk sense to the goons of August. When Condi Rice is a “wise man”, you know you’re in trouble.
The Democrats never impeached W and they had real grounds: starting a war on false premises and sanctioning torture.
“The Republican Party is in a constant struggle between its ego and its id,” said Axelrod, “and the id has mostly won out lately.”
It isn’t the president who should leave. It’s the misguided lawmakers trying to drive him out.
For some of the rodeo clowns clamouring for impeachment around the country, Barack Obama’s real crime is presiding while black.