High Crimes and Misdemeanors only for Non-Republican

Yes, the repugs are serious about impeaching President Obama. I still think they're hallucinating about taking back the House, but make no mistake, if they do, impeachment will be their sole priority.

And they'll do it for the same reason they did it to President Clinton: because he's not a republican. And because to them, being not republican is a crime.

Digby explained back in April:

(Obama is) actually a polarizer, which is completely predictable and not his fault. Sure, being African American enlivens the natural tribal state of American politics, but it would have happened anyway. We are polarized because we believe different things about what America stands for. We define ourselves differently. We have different values. It's not the first time. In fact it's defines American politics.

The problem is that the other side believes that our side is illegitimate and they have no obligation to abide by the government's decisions if they are not in charge.

And I continue to be surprised that after a bogus impeachment, an election decided by a partisan Supreme Court decision and a shocking war of choice, the Democrats failed to realize that Republican party no longer believed it needed to abide by the traditions and norms that had been holding together whatever fragile truce existed. This undemocratic streak has been around among the conservatives to some degree or another forever, but it rises up now and then and it's been evident since the early 90s that we were now in one of those times.

In March, Digby wrote about the illegitimacy issue, which is about far more than birth certificates:

Amanda Marcotte makes an important observation about all this, as it relates to my earlier post about the right's seeming inability to accept the idea of democracy. This is correct:

Well, it’s simple, really. They assume, if they don’t state it outright, that large numbers of American voters shouldn’t have the right to vote. That’s the implicit argument when Sarah Palin praises white rural voters as “Real Americans”, when Birthers obsess over the idea that the first black President simply can’t be eligible for office, when tea baggers yell racist and homophobic slurs at politicians, and when they insist that you eliminate black voters from the count if you want to find out how popular a politician “really” is. When Bart Stupak laughed out loud at the very idea that nuns have opinions worth listening to---and listed a bunch of men whose opinions were the ones that counted---you had a similar sentiment being expressed. Universal suffrage seems like a fundamental part of democracy to liberals, but it appears that conservatives think it de-legitimizes the results of elections. And that if you do something without Republicans on board, you’re eliminating those who represent the only people who count.

These people believe they represent a majority and they do: of white people. Obama only has a 35% approval rating among whites, (which is down from the 42% of whites that helped elect him.) If you have white supremacist tendencies, you're going to believe that he isn't representing a majority of Real Americans.

Indeed, it explains why Democratic presidents in general can't ever be legitimate. They are, after all, always elected with the support of African Americans, Hispanics and feminist women. That wasn't what the founders intended, now was it?