PRE-EMPTIVE SHRIEK.
The conservative impeachment crusade is metastasizing thus -- Rich Lowry at National Review:
Does Obama WANT to Get Impeached?
...The White House may consider the unilateral amnesty a winning move on several different levels: it gets its policy goal; it satisfies an important part of its base; and if there is any serious move toward impeachment, it rallies the entirety of the Democratic base in a way we haven’t seen since 2008 and — assuming the politics of impeachment are bad for Republicans — drives the middle away from the GOP. An administration that is fast entering its dotage could consider this one of the few potential positive game-changers that it has direct control over — the Constitution and the rule of law be damned.
Rep. Scalise Calls Out Obama: ‘First White House In History Trying To Start Narrative Of Impeachment’
“Who wants [impeachment]? The president does,” Beck argued. “Because then he’ll be able to say, ‘I demand justice.’ The birther thing is over, the Black thing is over. So now he needs to be able to call for justice.”
Etc. etc. etc.
As I have chronicled, conservatives have been plotting Obama's impeachment since 2009, and it's only getting worse: Try Googling "impeach" and "Benghazi" and see what you get. But now they're peddling the story that it's Obama who's trying to get impeached, based on the fact that Democrats are fundraising off the threat of a new Republican Senate railroading the President.
It reminds me of what happened in the endgame of the Obama birth certificate fiasco -- remember the afterbirthers, and how they tried to tell the world that Obama had set them up by pretending to be from Kenya? For example, John Hinderaker of Power Line, May 2012:
We know for sure that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, because it was announced in a local newspaper. But we also now know that for sixteen years, his literary agent circulated a bio that said he was born in Kenya. That statement must have come from Obama himself; or, at a bare minimum, it certainly was known to him. So: why? Why would Obama put it out that he was born in Kenya if he was actually born in Hawaii?
Over at PJ Media, CEO Roger Simon, a mystery writer by trade, put his mind to the puzzle and came up with an intriguing theory...
I'll spare you -- the upshot, in this case as in all of them, was that their extensive birther self-embarrassments weren't really their fault. Something similar's happening here, except it's isn't just salve for their blistered egos this time: They're hoping citizens who are balking at voting in an impeachment tribunal this November may be convinced that Republicans would never do anything like that, it's just something the wily Democrats are making up.
I'd like to think the Republicans' record of running the federal government like a demolition derby would keep people from believing them, but they're champeen hustlers and Americans can be suckers for a hard sell. We'll see.
UPDATE: In comments, Shakezula: "Remember, the Republican battle cry is LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!!"
Also, Neddy Merrill reminds us that less than a year before he started blaming Obama for impeaching himself, Glenn Beck was calling for his impeachment. Rich Lowry was hinting at the same thing just the other day -- for dealing with Obama's "constitutional deformation" of the Presidency, he said, "the Constitution equips [Congress] with its own tools to fight such battles, especially the power of the purse and impeachment." But Lowry took pains to preserve his plausible deniability with slippery language; since Beck's audience is mostly Alzheimer's sufferers and aphasics who don't remember what their Leader said from one day to the other, he didn't need to.
Shameless or shady, it's doesn't matter: Thus have the brethren promoted this bullshit into the mainstream. Probably in the middle of impeachment itself, they'll be sitting in the press box shaking their heads and going, "Wow, Obama's taking this thing further than I thought he would!"
UPDATE 2. Ha ha ha ha.