Watergate Revenge: Republicans Yearning to Impeach Obama Over Benghazi ‘Cover-Up’

By Joe Conason

Less than four months after Barack Obama’s inauguration, the right-wing propaganda machine is already promoting the only imaginable conclusion to a Democratic administration that dares to achieve a second term: impeachment. Once confined to the ranks of the birthers, the fantasy of removing President Obama from office is starting to fester in supposedly saner minds.

Certainly impeachment is on the mind of Mike Huckabee, the Fox News commentator who–as a former governor of Arkansas and political antagonist of Bill Clinton–can be expected to know something about the subject. On Monday, he predicted that the president will be forced from office before the end of his term by the controversy over the Benghazi consulate attack last September. According to Huckabee, while the Watergate scandal was “bad,” Benghazi is worse because four Americans died there, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The proximate cause for impeaching Obama, he suggested, is the “cover-up” of the facts concerning Benghazi. Moreover, he said, if the Democrats “try to protect the president and their party, and do so at the expense of the truth, they will go down.” When “the facts come out,” predicted Huckabee, “something will start” and ultimately the Democrats will lose “the right to govern.”

Presumably Huckabee believes impeachment would be easier than winning a national election. He isn’t alone in ruminating on the removal of a president who just won re-election last November–not on Fox News, anyway. (The ever-crafty Huck hedged by noting, however, that none of this will come to pass if Democrats win the midterm elections next year.)

Meanwhile, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, whose cranky pronouncements continue to embarrass responsible conservatives, upped the ante by confiding what Huckabee left out–namely, that like every desperate Republican, he yearns for a Benghazi scandal that will stick. If there was no cover-up, Bolton insisted with characteristically twisted logic that would prove Obama (the president who dispatched Osama bin Laden) simply doesn’t understand the ongoing threat from al-Qaida. “If it was merely a political cover-up,” he noted with satisfaction, “then there can be a political cost to pay.”

No doubt both Bolton and Huckabee–not to mention Rep. Darrell Issa, whose House Government Reform Committee maintains an

This article originally appeared on : TruthDig