Why I'm beginning to disagree with Sarah Palin about the impeachment of Barack Obama

I love Sarah Palin, but I’m beginning to disagree with her on impeachment.

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution says the following about impeachment: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. The House of Representatives has the sole power to impeach and the Senate the sole power to convict.

I’ve thought for some time that Barack Obama should be impeached. The IRS scandal alone was far worse than anything Richard Nixon ever did, or even thought of doing. Unfortunately we don’t thus far have a smoking gun. Benghazi may meet the threshold as well on the basis of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” in the dereliction of duty as Commander in Chief. Then of course there is the deluge of Obamacare violations. Repeatedly the law says one thing and Obama has done the opposite.

While I have no doubt Barack Obama deserves to be impeached, I’m no longer sure that he should be. It is most certain that the Republicans in the House could gather the votes to impeach.  The point of impeachment however is not impeachment... it's conviction.  Unfortunately however there is no way in hell that it would be possible today to get 67 votes for conviction in Senate. Former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards once said about his reelection prospects: "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy". Barack Obama might paraphrase that in reference to his conviction prospects in the Senate. Although I’m skeptical that even then the Senate would convict…

It’s not because I’m afraid he won’t get convicted that I no longer believe he should be impeached however. It’s because I no longer think it’s necessary. Why? Because Barack Obama is a lame duck. Not just lame in the traditional sense of presidents being lame in their second terms. But lame in the sense of being broken. Today his approval rating sits at 39%, the lowest of his presidency. While there seems to be a subset of Americans, about 40% of the population, who seem incapable of recognizing, or refusing to recognize incompetence when they see it, Barack Obama is making it much more difficult for those misguided souls to keep their heads in the sand. His incompetence and perfidy are becoming legion. Obamacare alone would make the case… and consumers will be livid when their subsidies evaporate. Then there’s the administration’s stonewalling in the IRS scandal investigation as more and more information emerges demonstrating its betrayal of our Constitution. Then there’s the chaos in Iraq and reversals in Afghanistan. His bludgeoning of Israel in its battle with Hamas. His impotent response to Vladimir Putin’s aggression and the shooting down of flight MH17. But perhaps most of all, Barack Obama’s betrayal of the American people can be seen in his efforts to “transform” the United States into a third world country by essentially eliminating our southern border while simultaneously inviting every Central American child to swim across the Rio Grande and become a Dreamer.

And that's the reason why Barack Obama should not be impeached. Because while the country and the world are in the grip of chaos and worse, he’s busy… playing golf. He’s attending fundraisers. He’s going on vacation and buying a $4.5 million home in Palm Springs. And Americans can see that. They see his indifferent attitude towards actually solving problems or leading, whether it’s the collapse of the border or the fires burning across the footprint of the Ottoman Empire. Even those predisposed to worship at the altar of Barack Obama can’t help but recognize his disinterest in the duties of actually governing. And that’s the point. To paraphrase Napoleon, When your enemy is in the process of destroying himself, don’t interfere.

Were the GOP to impeach Barack Obama now they would not only be interfering with Barack Obama’s immolation of his legacy, they would be throwing him a life preserver. The debate would suddenly shift from the reality of Obama’s incompetence to the fiction that he is being persecuted because of his race. That is perhaps the only thing worse than the nation collapsing under Barack Obama’s stewardship… the nation collapsing under Barack Obama’s stewardship and no one paying attention to the fact that it’s Barack Obama who’s causing the collapse.

Now this calculation could change. If we find an IRS smoking gun with Obama’s prints on it that even hardcore leftists can’t ignore, then impeach him. Absent something like that however there is no reason to rescue Obama from the morass he has brought upon himself. Doing so won’t help the country and will only turn him into a victim and help obscure his reputation for posterity. And that would be the ultimate disaster as future generations would never see the abject failure that was the anti-American presidency of Barack Obama, but instead would read about the heroic legacy of a black man persecuted for his race who was never given a chance.

Barack Obama doesn't see America the way you do

Barack Obama, hailing from Kenya – if only for college application purposes – and growing up in Indonesia, has always had something of an outsider’s perspective of the United States. Even when he lived in the United States, he lived in Hawaii, an island that up until two years before he was born was not even a state.

Of course the United States is a nation of immigrants, which by definition means that it has always beckoned outsiders. Usually they had a vision of the United States as one of opportunity and freedom of the sort not found in most places on the planet nor during most of human history. Whether coming from a famine ravaged Ireland or a war torn Italy or an economic basket case like Haiti, the United States for most outsiders is something very much resembling John Winthrop's shining “city upon a hill”.

Barack Obama had a different experience. Growing up with an absent – but anti western – father, a leftist mother and Communist sympathizing stand ins for his father, his image of the United States is one that most Americans would disagree with – or at least most did until the last few decades.

Barack Obama’s view of the United States sees it as an oppressor. One where whites have subjugated minorities for 240 years. Where the rich prey upon the poor. Where equality of outcomes is the true determinant of freedom, or lack thereof. Beyond our borders the United States was and is imperialist in acts if not in name. Using its military and economic might, the United States dominates the world to achieve its ethnocentric and self centered goals.

What is perhaps most telling about Barack Obama is that he, the “Constitutional scholar”, fundamentally misunderstands the basic element of the Constitution, the compact which allowed the United States to soar above any nation in human history in terms of the prosperity it has brought to itself and across the planet and the impact it has had on freedom around the world. Rather than recognizing the empowering nature of its limited government, for Mr. Obama, the Constitution is “a charter of negative liberties,” which “says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.”

Today we are experiencing – even if you’re not seeing much of it in the media – Barack Obama unleashed. If this were a Hollywood movie it might be called: Barack Obama: The Un-American. He is in the process of turning America into a dysfunctional banana republic by opening our borders to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who have little appreciation for our rule of law and the limited government our Constitution established. And he’s doing it in plain sight and few in the media seem to care. While George Bush was raked over the coals for Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that was very much not of his making, Barack Obama is getting a pass from the media for this humanitarian and national disaster that is very much of his making. If George Bush’s policies had caused 50,000 minors to trek over hundreds or thousands of dangerous miles, where hundreds if not thousands of them died on the journey, do you think the press would have given him a pass? Not a chance. If thousands of the girls making that trek – again because of his policies – were raped along the way, would the press have given George Bush a pass? Not likely. But Barack Obama? No blame there.

Then of course there is the question of national sovereignty. Barack Obama sees the United States as just another one of the member states of the world, equal to everyone else, no better, no worse. As every nation is exceptional, then none is. People who won the lottery and were born north of the Rio Grande should not have any advantages over those who were unlucky enough to be born south of it. With that guiding belief Barack Obama has embarked on a journey that will eliminate those differences, and borders. He is seeking to “fundamentally transform the United States” into a third world country, to essentially make the United States of America into a United States of the World.

His plan is to handicap the American economy so it can’t dominate the world. Make America less white, as whites are responsible for slavery, Jim Crow and most of the oppression the United States has meted out over the last 240 years, both domestically and around the world. Make government a bigger and more determinative part of life and the economy. Make citizens essentially wards of the state, because the Ivy League educated experts and the good hearted bureaucrats know better what’s right for them, from diet to jobs to neighborhood demographics to what healthcare they should be getting – but won’t be… That recipe has played itself out so well in so many places around the world… Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, Indonesia, Greece, Spain and even Hawaii. A United States of the World, that should work out well for everyone…

Why does Barack Obama have an 83% job approval rating among black Americans when he's doing so much damage to them?

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Barack Obama is rated as the worst president since WWII. That’s no surprise to anyone actually paying attention to the last five years of failure. What’s interesting however is how 40% of the American population can still approve of the way he’s doing his job. Demographics may play a part in that. Americans are no different than people everywhere else. When we don’t have a great deal of information about something or someone we grasp for those things that are familiar to us, that are like us. It’s like when you go to a party where you don’t know anyone. If you see someone you know, even if you don’t like them much you’re likely go over and talk to them, at least until you see someone you actually like or would rather talk to. That’s because at least you will have something to talk about rather than just standing around feeling awkward.

And in the United States there are a lot of voters who don’t have a great deal of information. Indeed, only 65% of native born Americans can get a pitiful 6 out of 10 answers right on the citizenship test – vs. 93% of immigrants preparing to take the test. And those are basic facts that everyone learned in school rather than positions on sometimes difficult issues.

The bottom line is that many, perhaps a majority of American voters know practically nothing about what candidates actually stand for and what policies they support. As a result, many voters simply support candidates who are like themselves or have perceived shared experiences… In 2008 one might understand why Barack Obama carried 95% of the black vote, despite the fact that most voters - regardless of race - didn’t really know his positions. It was a historical event with a black man running for president on a major ticket in a country that started out with slavery legal in half of its states. It’s understandable. One has to wonder however, how four years later, he could still garner 93% of the black vote, and today with a plethora of further failures his approval rating still stands at 83% among black Americans.

One wonders how that figure can stand when Barack Obama has done so much to harm black families.

He supports an increase in the minimum wage, which results in far fewer jobs for the unskilled, particularly youth. This hits black youth particularly hard, and the problem is worse today than when Obama took office. In 2009 the general unemployment rate in the US was 8% while for black youth it was 3.9 times higher at 31%. Fast forward after five years of Barack Obama and while the overall unemployment rate had dropped to 6.6% by February of 2014, for black youth it had actually grown to 38%, 5.9 times the rate of the general public.

With Obamacare Barack Obama has forced businesses, particularly small businesses, to limit the number of hours employees work so that they do not hit the full time threshold which would force those businesses to provide benefits that they often cannot afford. The result is fewer full time jobs for everyone, and those who need full time employment to support their families are forced to seek multiple part time jobs in order to make ends meet. The most recent jobs report demonstrates this with perfect clarity. The Obama administration crows at the fact that 288,000 net jobs were created in May, but what they don’t tell you is that 275,000 of them were part time jobs. And who is it that get that gets hurt by those far fewer full time jobs? Those with the highest unemployment rate, which happens to be blacks, with an unemployment rate of 10.7%, more than twice the 5.3% of white Americans.

The final item of curiosity is immigration, particularly illegal immigration. Barack Obama has opened the floodgates on our southern border, in essence inviting hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to wade across the Rio Grande – or send their children or babies across with coyotes – in hopes of getting a foothold in the United States so that they can gain amnesty and eventually bring their entire families to the United States. That’s a bad thing for all Americans, but a very bad thing for black Americans. Why? Because those immigrants will be competing for and taking the jobs that many black Americans might otherwise be getting. Since 2000 there have been 5.7 million net jobs created in the United States. And how many of those jobs went to immigrants – both legal and illegal? Surprise: 5.7 million! That means that literally every single net job that has been created in the last 14 years has gone to immigrants, the majority of them illegal. And who are these new and largely uneducated immigrants going to compete with for jobs? Is it the 1% who have flourished and grown richer under Barack Obama. Probably not. It’s going to be entry level and lower income workers, a group disproportionately populated by black Americans.

So the real question is, not why 33% of whites still approve of Barack Obama’s job performance or 47% of Hispanics… in a country where apparently 45% of the population still believe in ghosts you have to expect that some people are immune to reason. No, rather it’s why 83% of black Americans still support a politician who is not only demonstrably incompetent, but one who seems to be doing so much to damage to black families. Jobs are at the core of success in America… not government programs, not government handouts, not government anything. It’s a job that gives most Americans their self respect, sense of accomplishment, and most importantly the connection to a society where they can work hard and succeed, in this job or that better job or by creating a job for themselves and start hiring others. And to the degree that Barack Obama has had any impact on jobs in the United States it has been a negative one, particularly for black Americans. Maybe it’s time to recognize that Barack Obama is bad for all Americans, regardless of his race or that of anyone else, and that maybe politicians should be evaluated on their policies rather than their pigmentation.   

Random Observations on Government

Ronald Reagan was the most conservative president in the last 75 years. Despite interest rates of 20% when he took office, during the first 5 years of his presidency the economy grew by a total of 17.7%. Barack Obama is the most progressive president in American history. Despite interest rates close to zero throughout his terms, during the first 5 years of his presidency the economy grew by a total of 5.8%... and it's getting worse, shrinking at an annual rate of 2.9% in the first quarter of 2014!

At the very moment in time when crime in the United States is at record lows, local police departments are morphing into paramilitary armies. How many times have you heard of someone buying a brand new toy and letting it sit in the closet? Probably not that often…

Barack Obama’s never been a big fan of American Exceptionalism or hegemony, despite the fact that American leadership has ushered two generations of relative peace after two world wars in the first 40 years of the 20th century. He is however a big fan of international consensus and cooperation. The UN is a good example of just such cooperation. They are the ones who brought us a UN Human Rights Council featuring such freedom loving states as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba. Barack Obama likes that non-US centric model so much that he has decided the United States will relinquish its management of the Internet traffic cop organization, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). So now such liberty stalwarts as China, Venezuela and Iran will have just as much to say about the freedom of the Internet as the United States does. That should work out well.

Despite mounting proof that NOAA and other organizations manipulated data to further the myth of global warming… despite record cold temperatures and ice packs in the Great Lakes, Barack Obama believes “Climate Change” (AKA “Global Warming”) is as great a threat to national security as is terrorism.

Why is it that over the last 5 years GDP has grown by 6% yet the stock market is up by over 120%. Could it have anything to do with Big Government?

There are over 3,000 counties in the United States. Why are 7 of the 10 richest located adjacent to Washington, DC? No, that couldn’t have anything to do with Big Government.

The bad news: In 2014 there are 127,000 fewer native born Americans working than there were in 2000, despite that group growing by 17 million people. The good news: Since 2000 there have been approximately 5.7 million jobs created in the United States. The worse news: According to the Center for Immigration Studies, all of that 5.7 million net job growth has gone to immigrants – legal and illegal – leaving a total of 58 million working age native born Americans without work.

After years of practically non existent border enforcement, and his administration signaling to millions of poor that if they can just get to the United States they just might be able to stay, Barack Obama blames Republicans for the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who are flooding across America’s southern border. Constitution be damned, he’s going to use executive action to solve America’s immigration problem. Regardless of the rhetoric, the outcome of Obama’s unilateral action will likely be amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants who will soon thereafter be converted into Democrat voters.

Despite crystal clear evidence that ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline… Despite the fact that prices for everything from beef to plastic and everything in between are rising because so much farmland is dedicated to ethanol corn production… Despite the fact that ethanol significantly raises the price of gasoline… Congress just passed another Farm Bill that will provide tens of billions of dollars to maintain the ethanol cabal.

Congress’s approval ratings are at historic lows, in the single digits, yet somehow American voters regularly return over of 90% of their Congressmen and Senators to Washington.

Despite the fantasy that progressive policies are good for the poor, in the end they are bad for everyone, except those in government and the friends of those in government. If you’re riding the Wall Street gravy train then you love big government. If you’re a big business who uses government to limit competition and pad your bottom line, you love big government. If you’re a government employee with practically lifetime employment, 50% higher salaries than your private sector counterparts and the power of life or death over businesses, you love big government.

If however you are an entrepreneur seeking to start a business and create jobs, you are oppressed by big government. If however you are an unskilled youth seeking to get your first job, your opportunities are limited by big government. If however you a simple wage earner who wonders where the rest of your check went, big government exploits you.

None of this is rocket science, nor is there anything here particularly surprising. Nonetheless, Americans continue to vote for big government progressives in both parties and wonder why things never seem to get any better. The question is not whether this unsustainable and suffocating government system will end, but when. The more important question is, will the entity we know as the United States survive intact or will it devolve into anarchy and chaos and become just another ghost of a failed state on history’s chronicle of mankind’s evolution? If people with no sense of liberty, no appreciation for small government and no allegiance to the the Constitution keep getting elected, the outlook doesn't look good.