so what exactly is the impeachable bengazi offense?

[unblock]

muddling the p.r. message?
covering up the muddling of the p.r. message?
failure to identify terrorism in a timely fashion?

i know the real objective is just to make hay out of any distraction they can; but, seriously, what exactly are they even supposedly investigating?

[IggleDoer]

1. Being a Democrat?

[madaboutharry]

2. This is the impeachable offense:

Being the POTUS while Black.

[appleannie1]

7. And having the nerve to place other blacks in high ranking jobs.

[pscot]

21. BPWP

I guess you could call it progress.

[Initech]

44. It's on!!!!!

[gateley]

3. Obama is Black.

[appleannie1]

4. If you figure it out you can let the rest of us know. You would have to get into their

wacky heads to find an answer.

[RomneyLies]

5. Presidenting while Black

Definitely a high crime or misdemeanor in the eyes of a Republican House.

[denverbill]

6. Winning an election with views contrary to conservative crackpots.

[JoePhilly]

8. Patreaus probabaly got a BJ from his mistress, Obama appointed Patreaus director of the CIA ...

ergo .... Obama should be impeached for a BJ.

Its the Clinton impeachment all over again.

[hifiguy]

39. So the POTUS got a BJ by proxy?

That's an interesting theory.

[JoePhilly]

42. Give the GOP some time ... they'll get there.

I heard one of their idiots claim that Susan Rice was BAD because she was not a decision maker on the Bengazi intelligence, just some one who was asked to provide a simple brief on TV ... whereas Condi Rice was GOOD because she was responsible for the bad intelligence that she herself provided on TV.

If there are ~3000 dead Americans and a PDB from a month ealier predicting the attack .... Americans must rally around and reelect the President. If there are 4 Americans killed in a dangerous ME country, THAT is an impeachable offense.

The GOP is once again planning a coup. They will fail again. But that is what they are doing.

[Jackpine Radical]

9. A clear and flagrant case of PWB.

Prezidentin' While Black.

[LynneSin]

10. Still trying to figure that one out with Clinton

: D

[LadyHawkAZ]

11. Governing While Black

which he then escalated to Being Re-Elected While Black while refusing to Not Be Black. Also something something terrorism 9/11 something Muslims something. Official wording may differ slightly.

[Cleita]

12. I'm very afraid of this.

It's exactly what happened in California. We had just elected Grey Davis, a Democrat, to his second term in office as Governor, when Darryl Issa launched a petition campaign to recall him. Well, I never found the way the petition signatures were collected to be honest. However, my evidence is anecdotal and I have no proof without the Democrats having the will to investigate what happened and to get the paid for by Issa petition gatherers under oath to testify that they did indeed mislead people to sign the petitions. Well, the circus that followed got us Arnold as Governor.

I digress, but I see the same wheels turning here and if we don't take them seriously and keep those petition gatherers under very close surveillance and the whole machinery behind it, we may see a repeat of California. After all, they got a way with it once and they always try their dirty tricks again if they have been successful.

[jberryhill]

13. You understand the president cannot be impeached by "petition", yes?

[Cleita]

15. Yes, I do but a petition can lead those who can impeach him

to feel that they can do this. It starts the ball rolling.

[Posteritatis]

35. The ball started rolling on election day

The House will attempt to impeach him sometime during the current congress, mainly because as a body it's gotten that unhinged lately. If there wasn't a petition floating around someplace they'd find or fabricate some other reason, since "impeachable offense" is nothing more than "whatever the House of Representatives wants an impeachable offense to be."

[Cleita]

36. So you get why I'm concerned. With the Grey Davis recall, I saw just

how out of hand things get once that ball starts rolling. Most of us weren't concerned at first. Well, we did elect him to a second term didn't we? So who would sign that petition and then not vote for him in the recall election? WHO? Well we found out, didn't we?

[Posteritatis]

40. They're totally different mechanisms.

There is no popular recall formula for a president, just the whim of the house, and the whim of the house was pretty much decided the moment Ohio was called earlier this month.

As like what happened with Clinton, this congress or the next one will attempt to impeach the president on some absurd premise or another. I can't see it not happening, regardless of petitions or media spin or whatever else. The House spent the last few years being as obstructionist as it could be, that didn't work, so they'll do what happened in the nineties and try to remove the president on some flimsy excuse like Benghazi or having an inappropriate vowel-to-consonant ratio in his name or something like that.

That'll happen, the proceedings either will or won't fall flat on their face, and in a worst case scenario the Senate will try the "charges," shoot them down because of the Democratic majority (probably coupled with a few Republican defections in the final vote), and life will go on with the main cost being a lot of wasted time and energy which would be wasted by this congress no matter what.

The public has zero say in that entire process. Comparing a presidential impeachment to a state governor's recall just doesn't make sense.

I'm largely indifferent to the whole thing. It's just another form of the ridiculous tantrums that have been going on the last several years in the first place, and has just as good a chance of getting rid of the president as anything else people have tried so far. Unless the Democrats lose both the House and the Senate by substantial amounts in 2014, this month's election is the closest the GOP will get to removing the president from office. I'm not going to say "I don't care," because the entire thing is going to be a ridiculous, childish waste of time, money and other resources, but I'm not going to say I'm really worried about the outcome either.

[Cleita]

46. Well, let's hope we are waiting for them at the pass and don't let them through

the first stage. We have to stop them before they begin.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

17. Plus The CA Petition Had The Force Of Law As It Was To Get Recall On The Ballot

Not a bunch of online loons with too much time on their hands.


This is hysterical bovine excrement.

[Cleita]

23. What makes you think that the forces behind the online loons

don't know what they are doing. It seems this is starting in Ohio, the place that has had more than it's share of election fraud.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

27. Because You Need Sixty Seven Votes In The Senate

Even if every (R) senator voted to remove the president they are still twenty two votes short. There are not twenty two Democratic senators who will vote to remove the president.

[Cleita]

28. Doesn't matter. Sure they couldn't remove Clinton in the end but look

at the horrible process we went through until it was over with. You gotta be crazy to want that again.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

16. CA Has A Recall Provision In Its Constitution

Impeachment is a totally different animal. There are not 67 votes in the Senate for impeachment. I'm not sure there's even forty...


And I think if the House was crazy enough to impeach the president, Harry Reid should refuse to bring the impeachment articles to the Senate floor, thus creating a Constitutional crisis, and bringing on the Apocalypse.

[Cleita]

22. Probably, but remember we are dealing with people who

believe the ends justify the means. They are just too smarmy to be trusted to play by the rules and the fact they were able to bring impeachment proceedings against Clinton points to how low-life they are and how they will grasp at anything to achieve their ends. Read the whole recall thing in California. It wasn't the petitions that brought down Davis but the momentum the petitions achieved that caused ordinarily sensible Californians to allow their Governor to be brought down by a crook and elect a hammy actor in his place instead.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

26. Impeachment Is A Political Process, Even More Than A Legal One.

There isn't close to sixty seven votes in the Senate. I'm not sure there are are 218 votes in the House. I have to believe there are a dozen or so Repugs who aren't bat shit crazy.

[Cleita]

30. There shouldn't be any in office that are bat shit crazy, yet

there they are, interfering with legislation that could move this country ahead. God to let them even start something like this even before the President's second term begins shows that the neo-cons feel they can keep obstructing the Democrats, who are the real patriots in this, until they get their own PNAC crowd back into power again.

[Jade Fox]

19. Hopefully, they could not get away with that again....

because the times have changed, and that was a painful but educational experience for the Democrats. Also, look who you got: The now at least partially discredited Arnold S.

I'm going to be optimistic here, and assume most Americans (except Fox New nuts) can see what is going on: The Republicans are pulling out all the stops to somehow reverse/deny the election results. The GOP party itself is going 8 different directions at once, and at least some of their faithful are jumping ship.

But I can understand you fear, if you lived through it in CA.

[Cleita]

24. Thank you. After that I don't dismiss any lunacy because

I have seen how it can work it.

[valerief]

14. GWB--governing while black. nt

[PufPuf23]

18. Goofing up the GOPs October surprise for the election?

Sure looks to me like Petraeus is a backstabber.

[Turbineguy]

20. Presidenting

while Black.

[AntiFascist]

25. Allowing Libyan arms to be distributed to Al Qaeda?

but that should be Petraeus' fault since he was in charge of covert operations. Obama got stung because he associates with neocons. Hope he learned his lesson.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

29. Those are the only things that I've heard so far

None of which constitute anything remotely close to "high crimes and misdemeanors" though the Republicans set the bar ridiculously low for Democratic Presidents but so ridiculously high for Republican Presidents it's absurd.

My basic position is that if they're going to go after President Obama and/or other members of his Administration over what happened in Benghazi, they need to first go back to the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut under Reagan, 9/11 under Bush II, Iraq under Bush II, and all of the embassy attacks under Bush II and hold Reagan and Bush culpable for all of the deaths. Until they do that and hold all living (and dead) members of previous Administrations accountable for all of the deaths of Americans that occurred under their watch, they need to STFU about what happened in Benghazi.

It was a tragedy and we need to find out what happened so that we can do a better job of preventing such attacks from being successful in the future but there's been nothing advanced so far that suggests the need for a "Watergate-style" commission (which would be more about the GOP's theatrics more than finding out the truth IMHO) to do what House and Senate intelligence committees appear to be quite capably handling at the moment.

[kestrel91316]

31. Prezniting While Black.

[yellowcanine]

32. Pubs wanted a scandal and can't find one.

No fair.

[Xithras]

33. Technically, you don't need a crime to impeach.

Benjamin Franklin, who proposed and helped to write the impeachment provision in the Constitution, once said that it was written in such a way that it could be used whenever a President "rendered himself obnoxious." Supporting documents have also found that it was originally written to permit the removal of a President for "whatever reason whatsoever".

There was some discussion about this back duing the Clinton fiasco. During that impeachment, he was accused of a "High Crime", which includes an official perjuring themselves under oath. He was accused of an actual crime, but a crime isn't required.

In the 1970's Congress declared that the term "High Crime and Misdemeanors" is a term of "high art" (meaning it has a definition beyond it's literal words). The Supreme Court has additionally ruled that High Art terms in the Constitution (which also include terms like Due Process) must be legally interpreted using their definitions at the time of their writing, and not our modern definitions.

Nowadays, "misdemeanor" means a crime. In the 1780's "misdemeanor" simply meant a minor offense, criminal or otherwise, and included things like being an unfit leader, incapacity, negligence, "perfidity", "maladministration", misconduct, and on, and on. Generally speaking, it can be applied to any behavior that the House of Representatives believes demonstrates an unfitness for leadership.

Given the mental gymnastics that so many Thugs have resorted to with the whole "Natural Born Citizen" thing, I'm not too shocked to see some of them attempting wordgames with this too.

I don't see it going anywhere though. Impeachment for non-crimes hasn't happened in the past for one simple reason: Once a Congress impeaches a President simply because they agree with him, it WILL become a regular thing for future Congresses. Nobody wants to see Congress replacing every President they disagree with. If Congress were to impeach Obama over his alleged "leadership failures" with Benghazi, can you imagine how quick they would throw out the next GWB? The gloves would come off, and politics would get a lot nastier in this country.

[unblock]

37. my question was what are they even investigating?

i agree that all they need is a pretense for impeachment, not an actual crime.

so what's the pretense?

so far it sounds to me like they want to impeach obama, officially, for bungling a p.r. message.



given that they don't need a crime to impeach, they don't really need an investigation either.

[Posteritatis]

41. That'd be playing to their constituents for the midterms. (nt)

[Posteritatis]

34. Being a Democratic president. I expect we'll see regular impeachment attempts from now on. (nt)

[hifiguy]

38. Lack of omnipotence and

being President of the United States while Black.

[librechik]

43. They hope they can agitate enough to get a real hearing, then subpoena the President

then do everything possible to work the Perjury Trap on him.

That's what they did to Clinton and it worked great, really. It defused Clinton's second term, and blew 75 or 80 million dollars we couldn't then use for progressive programs.

[intaglio]

45. The offense? Being President whilst black

made more egregious by winning an election by what Republicans would have called a landslide if it had been in their favour