Of Urinals and Impeachment…

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am disgusted by the crazy  self-professed Christians whose recent “Faith and Freedom” Convention was highlighted by the presence of crude racist figurines of President Obama in the urinals.

This crude and childish prank was only marginally more offensive than last Saturday’s call for Obama’s impeachment by the South Dakota GOP. (As a friend noted on Facebook, Article I of the specifications would be “Governing while black.”)

I have a news bulletin for the South Dakota Republican Party: disagreeing with a President and/or his policies is not grounds for impeachment. Like him or hate him, find him competent or feckless, this President has done nothing remotely approaching the high crimes and misdemeanors that warrant impeachment. Impeachment isn’t a recall mechanism.  (Besides, if Dick Cheney wasn’t impeachable, no one is.)

There are lots of reasons why people might disagree with this or any President. And certainly this is not the only era in which toxic partisanship has encouraged unhinged animus toward an occupant of the White House. But in my (long) lifetime I have never seen anything approaching the level of pure hatred, disrespect for the office of the Presidency, and complete and utter irrationality that has characterized the reaction of so many Americans to the Obama Presidency.

Is everyone who opposes this President a racist? Of course not.

But most of those who hate him are. And in their hysterical efforts to deny our first black President any  policy or political successes, these moral midgets are willing to block progress for the whole country. They are willing to keep judicial and administrative positions unfilled for years. Willing to shut down the government. Willing to oppose measures that they themselves introduced and formerly championed. Willing to tear the country apart in order to blame Obama for failing to hold it together.

They are willing to piss on America if just a little of that piss lands on the President.

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