IMPEACHING HOLDER: PLEASE PROCEED, CONGRESSMAN

A lot us have been assuming it was only a matter of time before Republicans tried to impeach President Obama -- but I guess the crazies have decided that impeaching one black guy is just as good as impeaching another, at least if a plan by the congressman who told us creditors would welcome a U.S. government default bears fruit:

GOP Rep. Ted Yoho says a group of House Republicans wants to impeach Attorney General Eric Holder....

"It's to get him out of office -- impeachment," Yoho said, according to the Gainesville Sun, adding "it will probably be when we get back in [Washington]. It will be before the end of the year. This will go to the speaker and the speaker will decide if it comes up or not."

Yoho cited frustration over the botched "Fast and Furious" program -- in which federal agents allowed guns to "walk" to Mexican drug cartels as part of an investigation -- as one of the main motivations for the impeachment push....

Please do this. Please do this. John Boehner, please add this to your list of things you allow the teabagger crazies to do so they won't be mean to you. Heritage Action? Please bankroll a large number of House and Senate candidates who vow to make this their #1 priority (after repealing Obamacare, of course).

There's a simple reason that people who watch TV channels other than Fox News haven't become outraged at what happened in Fast and Furious. No, they don't think it was a good idea. No, they're not callous about the deaths of law enforcement personnel.

The reason non-Fox-obsessed Americans have shrugged this off is that we do all sorts of things in this country to fight crime, some of them reckless and foolhardy and ill-conceived. We do stop-and-frisks and high-speed chases and SWAT raids on homes that aren't always the intended targets. We form drug squads that sometimes get bad guys off the streets and sometimes turn cops into dealers' accomplices. Some people get hurt who shouldn't, and some even die; some guilty people emerge unscathed.

But we tend to define the misdeeds as crimes only when we think there was actual malice. Impeaching Holder over Fast and Furious would be, for most people, an attempt to criminalize misjudgments. People who aren't knee-jerk wingnuts don't want to do that.

I know: Much of the right believes that Fast and Furious was a massive conspiracy to drum up support for gun control. Yes, House Republicans, please try to sell that line to the American public. The murders of twenty schoolchildren in Connecticut didn't lead to new gun legislation at the federal level; how the hell was this supposed to accomplish that goal?

The right's Fast and Furious obsession exposes two aspects of wingnut insanity: conspiracy-mindedness (Obama and Holder got law enforcement personnel killed as part of a devious scheme to take away citizens' guns!) as well as delusions of grandeur (only outrage at Fast and Furious on the part of true conservative patriots prevented this massive gun grab!).

Please try to sell that narrative to the American public next year, right-wingers. While most Americans continue to struggle in a sluggish economy, please spend weeks if not months with Eric Holder in the dock. Oh, sure, you'll motivate your own voter base -- but that will just mean that gunnier-than-thou candidates will win GOP primaries and, in some cases, lose general elections. Meanwhile, the rest of the country will see what the Republican Party's true priorities are. '

We may not have to nationalize the election -- you'll do it for us. You'll make insane monomania the face of the GOP all over again.