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<div class="">August 24, 2013</div>
<h1>Reindeer Games</h1>
<h6 class="">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by MAUREEN DOWD"><span>MAUREEN DOWD</span></a></span></h6>
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<p>
WASHINGTON — ON the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have
a Dream” speech, Kerry Bentivolio, a Michigan congressman, has a dream,
too: to impeach the nation’s first black president. </p>
<p>
“If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come
true,” the freshman Republican told a local G.O.P. club meeting Monday
in Birmingham, Mich., in a video posted on YouTube and reported by
BuzzFeed. </p>
<p>
Bentivolio graciously conceded that he’d have to come up with some
grounds first. “I went back to my office and I have had lawyers come
in,” he said. “And these are lawyers, well — Ph.D.’s in history — I
said, ‘Tell me how I can impeach the president of the United States.
What evidence do you have?’ You’ve got to have the evidence.” </p>
<p>
The Tea Party congressman, a member of the House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee, hopes to find e-mails linking the White
House to the I.R.S. examination of groups with a “Tea Party” label
seeking tax-exempt status. </p>
<p>
“I stood 12 feet away from the guy and listened to him and I couldn’t
stand being there,” he said of President Obama, “but because he is
president I have to respect the office.” </p>
<p>
Bentivolio is the perfect avatar of the impeachment fever gripping a
G.O.P. that’s unmoored from reality, given that he once admitted in a
court deposition, “I have a problem figuring out which one I really am,
Santa Claus or Kerry Bentivolio.” That’s why he sometimes used the
pronoun “we.” </p>
<p>
He’s been playing Santa Claus — as part of a business he started 19
years ago called Old Fashion Santa — with his own six reindeer. “To
project authenticity, he’s even sought clearance from Selfridge Air
National Guard Base in Mount Clemens to fly his sleigh in its airspace
on Christmas Eve,” Kathleen Gray wrote in The Detroit Free Press.
</p>
<p>
He told National Review that he takes being called crazy as a
compliment, so “it didn’t really bother me when people were saying,
‘That guy’s kooky because he has reindeer.’ No, they’re kooky because
they don’t have ’em.” </p>
<p>
Bentivolio also had a small role “in a low-budget independent film that
seemed to suggest that 9/11 was an inside job,” the magazine said.
</p>
<p>
The Free Press reported that Bentivolio, no Edmund Gwenn in “Miracle on
34th Street,” left a teaching job in 2011 “after complaints he bullied
students, even telling one class on its first day that his goal was to
make all the students cry once during the year.” How much more
gratifying to bully the president. </p>
<p>
Not content with fighting off a popular immigration overhaul or
threatening to shut down the government and set off the first federal
default, hard-core Congressional Republicans want to nullify the
election. Unlike when the Republicans did their nutty impeachment of
Bill Clinton — (Newt Gingrich is back, starring in the “Crossfire”
reboot) — they don’t even control the Senate. And as David Axelrod told
me, there isn’t a “scintilla of justification.” </p>
<p>
It’s lucky the president got another dog if Tom Coburn is his friend. At
a town hall in Muskogee Wednesday, when an audience member called the
administration “lawless,” the Oklahoma senator said his buddy was
“getting perilously close” to the standard of high crimes and
misdemeanors. </p>
<p>
“I wonder what Coburn is saying about his enemies,” Axelrod says dryly. </p>
<p>
In Texas recently, another Republican congressman, Blake Farenthold,
answered a birther at a town hall. “If we were to impeach the president
tomorrow, we would probably get the votes in the House of
Representatives to do it,” he said, but added that it would never pass
in the Senate. </p>
<p>
At another Texas session Monday, someone asked Senator Ted Cruz
(R-Canada), why they couldn’t impeach Obama. “It’s a good question,”
Cruz replied, before noting that Democrats control the Senate. </p>
<p>
Earlier this month, the president’s motorcade pulled into the Orlando
Hilton and was greeted by about 50 protesters holding signs saying
“Kenyan Go Home,” “Impeach Obama” and “Obama Lies.” </p>
<p>
BuzzFeed had a pictorial on the “Overpasses for Obama’s Impeachment”
fad, where people hold up homemade signs on overpasses. And they
reported on 100,000 preorders for the book “Impeachable Offenses: The
Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office,” covering sore points from
Benghazi to Obamacare to T.S.A. screenings. </p>
<p>
This month has been rife with efforts among the G.O.P. “wise men,” using
every channel possible — polls, op-eds, cable, Twitter — to try to talk
sense to the goons of August. When Condi Rice is a “wise man,” you know
you’re in trouble. </p>
<p>
The Democrats never impeached W. and they had real grounds: starting a
war on false premises and sanctioning torture. “The Republican Party is
in a constant struggle between its ego and its id,” Axelrod says, “and
the id has mostly won out lately.” </p>
<p>
It isn’t the president who should leave. It’s the misguided lawmakers trying to drive him out. </p>
<p>
For some of the rodeo clowns clamoring for impeachment around the
country, Barack Obama’s real crime is presiding while black. </p>
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<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
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