The unfortunate congressman is Blake Farenthold (R-TX). According the various MSM sources (I read it in this post), the rep was explaining that impeachment would pass in the House and go down to defeat in the Senate, so it didn't make sense to do it.
Hotair has a somewhat different take:
That sounds more plausible than the MSM take. Nonetheless, conservatives are having to walk back expectations of the outer right, expectations such as imminent impeachment or the shutting down of Obamacare, which just aren't going to happen.Farenthold’s not floating impeachment, he’s just trying to make a Birther go away. This is his way of appeasing her.
It's good that some GOP reps are trying to cool down the crazy, but there's a hell of a lot of it out there. I doubt this effort will be enough. The outer right has been fed fairly extreme rhetoric for four years now. The sentiments that have been built up aren't going to change in just 2-3 months. I expect sparks to fly this fall.
Image: usnews.com
Update 8/22/13. It isn't news, but another Republican congressman had to disappoint a constituent demanding that Obama be impeached. This congressman says that it would be a "dream come true" if he could do it, but dang, there's no evidence. Too bad he doesn't ask where are these false expectations came from.
5 comments:
I think we agree, MP, that the GOP is reaping what they sowed.
It is a fair conclusion that the source of the impeachment anger is not from the strength of the evidence that Obama was not born in the U.S. The contradicting evidence is overwhelming and the evidence to support impeachment on non-citizenship would never stand in a court.
Hence, the anger (and warped view of the evidence) must come from somewhere else in these people, and it can't be simply that Obama is a Democrat who won a majority of the votes in two national elections. It has to be people who hate Obama for who he is, but the evidence to support venal hatred is weak there as well. He's a solid family man, no obvious vices, temperate speech and manor, good sense of humor etc. He's not exactly Dick Cheney or Dick Nixon, out to ruthlessly crush his enemies, either.
So it has to be the color of his skin. And, I suggest, that if both his parents were African-American (as opposed to one being African and the other Caucasian-American) the venality might be tempered somewhat. But the notion that his mother would have a half-black half-white child who would grow up to be President of the United States has to be a slap in the face to them. Their anger is far too personal.
When put to political use by the GOP -- which they did so effectively in 2009-11 -- you end up with the movement you have now. The Congressman says that impeachment would pass the House? On what basis? If my Congressman voted for it he'd be run out of office in 2014!!
Appeasement no longer works. Either they deliver the bad news unvarnished or they will lose in the end again.
@Dangerous, I don't agree with your logic that "it has to be the color of his skin." There's plenty of venom toward socialist tinged academics, and that is certainly Obama's background.
His mother is quite the epitome of leftist hippie girl--marrying two non-white foreigners, moving overseas, getting an advanced degree, doing sociology research, putting her son in private school.
Then there's Obama himself. The facts of his life do fit nicely into a narrative of leftist pruning and shaping. There's no major amount of time spent in the corporate world. If you look at these facts, and hear how someone like Glenn Beck spins them, it sounds like Obama is groomed by radicals. You ignore his words or the legislation he's supported because... those of a coverup. There's plenty there without reaching to racism. There's also the example of how Clinton was reviled. I definitely think it's much more political, with little racial component. It's also personal, with a visceral hatred of this kind of political position.
(I thought Obama wouldn't be the lightning rod that Hillary would have been. How naive of me. The right is steeped in hate of the left.)
I very much like your succinct final statements. No more appeasement. Unvarnished straight news. They definitely need it, as do we all.
But nobody ever challenged Clinton's nationality, did they? And the fact the Obama was born in Hawaii hardly matters, I think. If he was born in Kansas (according to documents) people would still claim he was actually born in Kenya because his father was Kenyan.
The attack on his nationality of birth is not because he's liberal or socialist or a Democrat, or because of his policies. It's because he's half-black. There's no other reason to doubt the third-party documents that prove he was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, which became the 50th state in 1960.
Racism isn't the only plausible basis to hate Obama. I'm not arguing that. But racism is the only plausible basis to challenge his nationality of birth. If both of his parents were white, his birth nationality would never be questioned with exactly the same documents and exactly the same name.
@dangerous, let's stop this useless argument. Neither of us can prove or disprove that the birther nonsense is based on race since the birthers hide their real agenda. Besides, it may vary with the birther, or it may be multifactorial. Unless we can reliably read what is in each birther's black heart, we can't prove anything. My opinion stands, but I don't want to have this argument and I don't see the benefit of it either.
One good thing to come out of this, I found a great website that tracked down the origin of this birther rumor. That's incredibly hard to do, but the links are there. Here's also Wikipedia's take, which is not exhaustive, but probably serves as the go-to "truth."
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