Make it stop.
Bush-era megahack Marc Thiessen has graced the
Washington Post (yes, he writes for them, probably because the
Post opinion pages are a welfare system for humiliated conservatives) to inform us of yet another super-duper urgent reason why we may need to impeach Obama. According to the Bush speechwriter, the president may have leaked classified information! No, he means
this president! Oh, and he doesn't mean this
president, but maybe people in his inner circle, and
wouldn't that be outrageous?
Imagine if The Post broke a story about the biggest scandal of the Obama-era — and Washington responded with a collective yawn?
That’s precisely what happened recently when The Post reported on its front page that senior Obama administration officials were being investigated by the FBI and Justice Department for the leak last summer that the president had personally ordered cyberattacks on the Iranian nuclear program using a computer virus developed with Israel called Stuxnet.
The difference between a ranting naked man on a street corner and Marc Thiessen is that some idiot put the contents of Theissen's cardboard sign up on the
Post opinion pages.
Biggest. Scandal. Ever! You guys! You guys, look over here!
There are several problems with Thiessen's argument, all of which Thiessen has the foresight to actually put in his damn column. First, if someone leaked information about Stuxnet and the president didn't authorize it, there's nothing goddamn impeachable there and, second, if someone leaked information about Stuxnet and the president did know it, there's also nothing goddamn impeachable there. As we have learned from the Bush/Cheney/Rove team, after all, the president and anyone associated with the president can reveal super-secret classified information whenever they want, for any reason, and if you don't like it it's because you hate America.
But that was then, in the before-times. Now things are different, as Thiessen actually, honest-to-God writes (yes, yes, let's jump below the fold for this one):
If the president authorized the disclosure of national security secrets that exposed a covert action and undermined a U.S. ally in an effort to gain a political advantage in his reelection campaign, that would be a scandal of gigantic proportions. As one former top Justice Department official told me “if done for political gain, rather than for a bona fide purpose advancing the public interests of the United States, it could be grounds for impeachment.”
I may need to embroider that and thumbtack it to my wall. You know, for posterity.
You have to marvel at least a little at the nerve of this clown. If you told me a Bush-era crony was going to be arguing to the nation, apparently with a straight face, that the president of the United States probably ought to be impeached because maybe some guys leaked classified info about an undercover CIA agent whose husband penned an op-ed column that pissed them off a secret strike against an Iranian nuclear program, I admit, I wouldn't have believed you. Then again, I have a hard time believing most of these people still have political careers at all. In a more sensible world, there'd be a Washington, D.C., fast food establishment staffed entirely with discredited Bushians. And no, you wouldn't want to eat there.
The efforts supposedly serious conservatives have gone to in order to find something, anything they can cling to as The Impeachable Offense at this point counts as a bonafide obsession. There was Fast and Furious, and Solyndra, and hardly a morning goes by without some mid-tier state functionary opining that the scary president is violatin' teh Constitution with his plot to something-something guns, or his plot to something-something immigration, and all of that paled in comparison to the worst possible of things, the time Barack Obama worked with the House and Senate to give Americans slightly better health insurance choices. That one nearly had die-hard conservatives rioting in the streets, except that most of the truly outraged ones weren't really in good enough physical shape for a riot.
They're already convinced Obama was the cause of a financial collapse that occurred before he was even president. Give them another few years, and Marc Thiessen will be writing columns in the Post saying that we ought to be impeaching Obama for getting us into war with Iraq.