You quite properly point out:
Fair or not, too many people have the perception of impeachment as an attempt to undo the results of a lawful election. Also, the way it goes down makes those bringing the action appear to many to be vengeful and vindictive, which is also not a good place to be politically.
To reinforce the truth of what you say I am reminded that the events that led to the impeachment fiasco began with the delivery of a pizza during a shutdown of the government, an equally righteous attempt to govern decently by bringing under control what, by the standards of that day, was runaway spending. The public reacted against the Republicans and for Bill Clinton in that situation as well.
In each instance the media generally went to the defense of their champion, Bill Clinton. One wonders if the landscape has changed in a dozen years. Fox news is now ascendant, talk radio is ubiquitous, conservative Internet blogs are universally accessible. The ability of the conventional media to shepherd public opinion is severely diminished.
On the other hand, we saw how effective the forces of the left can still be when we witness the tsunami that swept Barack Obama through the primary process and into the Oval Office. So eager was the media to elect an African-American that they torpedoed Hillary Clinton to do it. So enamored were they of the possibility of an African-American president that the media effectively abandoned the champion they had supported in the government shutdown and in impeachment.
But the conventional media had thoroughly plowed the ground well before the election of Barack Obama, they had succeeded in demonizing George Bush and driving him into a bunker from which during the last two years of his presidency he declined to emerge and fight his corner except to persist in what I think he regarded as his "calling" to wage the war in Iraq.
In the year of Obama's incumbency we have witnessed an astonishing awakening to politics by the normally somnolent American electorate. What aroused them and is this time really different?
We conservatives sometimes misconceive the forces arrayed against us and think that we are battling mainly against a conventional media of a leftist bent. The fact is that we are increasingly beleaguered by an array of forces which push the country always leftwards. These forces include demographics, especially immigration, and birth rates which stock the electorate with congenital Democrats. Our education institutions from K through postgraduate work are thoroughly infiltrated and dominated by leftists and every school graduation ceremony represents a new crop of leftist voters. Our eleemosynary institutions including our foundations such as Tides, Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur have all been perverted to the opposite point of view from there founding settlors. Our churches from the National Council of Churches, some extremely radical Catholic clerics, to outright communist fronts like Reverend Wright, are all political power centers given over to leftist worldview. Political correctness in general, exploiting race to intimidate those who love liberty, have made it increasingly uncomfortable or financially unprofitable to risk the label: racist, homophobe, bigot, sexist, denier, birther, or fundamentalist, to name a few excrescences of this form of mind control.
It is fascinating, or more accurately put, horrifying, to see how thoroughly interwoven this leftist fabric is as we watched Obama co-opt one American institution after another in support of his health insurance reform attempts. It exposed for us the reality that the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association-who knew?-have been suborned by the left. The Obama administration has exposed how such divers entities as Wall Street, the AARP, the unions, and the entire environmental movement can be manipulated, through greed or through ideology, to its sinister purposes. One can only think of the Lenin principle that the last capitalist will sell the rope for his hanging.
We are not just fighting a battle in the electoral college we are fighting a battle fought with children programmed to sing, Stepford fashion, chants of praise for Obama. This is sinister beyond description. Watching these children mindlessly offering up obeisance to Obama engorges one with indignation. I said to myself, God help us the left has won after all even with these children who escaped the abortionist's knife because they have been put to a political lobotomy.
It is human nature to be passive politically and it is only a few freaks who must play God who devilishly compelled to dominate and exploit an otherwise passive and contented electorate. But the electorate today is not passive because it is not contented; it is afraid and fear often expresses itself in anger. The question is, how deep and how energizing it is that anger?
One test, strangely, will be the respectability with which the "birther" movement is treated. As the standing of Barack Obama continues to deteriorate I predict the respectability of the demand that he demonstrate his constitutional qualification for office will increase. I hope it increases to the point that enough states require that a candidate for the office of President of the United States demonstrate his constitutional fitness for the office. Then, we shall see.
America is aroused today as it was not aroused for the impeachment of Bill Clinton because it understands that its very survival is at stake. Bill Clinton might have sodomized an intern with the cigar in the Oval Office and then masturbated into the presidential sink, but no American faced foreclosure and ruin as a result. Many Americans today understand that if Obama gets his way for the "transformation" of America as we know it, with such contrivances such as Obamacare and Cap and Trade, their life as they know it will come to a very sorry end.
In such tipping points as we have witnessed in American history from Lexington and Concord through Fort Sumter to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Providence has always raised up a man for the season. God has not yet vouchsafed us such a man for this season but I believe he will in his perfect time.
