That's Guilty -- Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

I was listening to Democracy Now! this morning, and guess who their guest was? Why, Michael Moore, pimping his new movie Capitalism: a Love Story. His discomfort was audible if not palpable. On the one hand, he recognizes that Obama has not lived up to Moore's many hopes. On the other hand, he still hopes that Obama is playing eleven-dimensional chess with his opponents; he just doesn't realize that he and the American people in general are Obama's opponents. So, when he was listing the many crimes involved in the Bush junta's handling of the economic crisis, he couldn't quite bring himself to include Obama among the conspirators, the enablers and collaborators, the accessories before and after the fact.

IOZ writes this morning:

Since taking office, he has ratified the policies of domestic surveillance that supposedly marked his predecessors as uniquely intrusive, has continued their policies of detention, has expanded a war, has reaffirmed rendition, i.e. kidnapping, is building a bigger, better concentration camp at Bagram, etc. etc. Practically speaking, he is at least Cheney's equal, with two exceptions. One: he is the president. Two: he is immensely popular.

Many liberals and progressives and suchlike will tell you, and not without some reason, that they oppose these policies now as they did before, that they condemn them in this administration as they did in the last. But it takes no special powers of discernment to see that their hearts aren't in it, that the frequency and fervor of their criticism is greatly diminished, that the prospect of some or other bullshit, half-assed, health-insurance subsidy causes them to pull their punches, and that their temperamental preference for Obama is a fine substitute in their minds for substantive improvement. When they begin suggesting that he be impeached, as they yowled about Cheney, I will take them more seriously in their complaints that I and others like me target them unfairly. They remain "supporters" of this president. Well, why does he need, and why does he deserve anybody's support?

I'd been thinking along the same lines earlier this week, thinking about Obama's international terrorism, but IOZ, who's bolder than I, threw down the gauntlet first. So yeah, impeach him, I'm game.

When the time comes (and you know the Republicans have been working on it all along), the impeachment will probably be for irrelevancies, like Clinton's. There's the rub. Maybe it will emerge that Obama smoked in the White House, violating all kinds of non-smoking ordinances that the Republicans always opposed as a violation of personal liberty. It always pissed me off, during and after the Clinton administration, to have to correct the lies of the Right (including the Democratic Right) about the malfeasance of the Pudgy Satan. (Just as my Korean friends complained of having to defend former President Noh Mu-hyeon when he was impeached.) I suppose I'll end up in the same position with Obama.