Because, of course, that's much more likely than impeachment:
A retired Army general, Major General Paul E. Vallely, is demanding Congress and all branches of our government to do their "Constitutional duties" demanding the "forced resignations" of Obama and other administration officials.
Strictly speaking, (1) "constitutional duties" refers to impeachment, not futile grandstanding; and (2) the impeachment process doesn't involve all branches of government. So clearly, General Vallely is something less than a constitutional scholar.
Vallely is the former deputy commanding general of Pacific Command. He said there needs to be a grass-roots campaign that includes protests and social media.
He's calling for nationwide rallies, protests and peaceful "civil uprisings" to get the job done. The leaders who have failed this nation need to be pressured into leaving office.
As is always the case with this kind of tiresome cheerleading, I commend General Vallely for his objective, but can only shake my head at his designated tactics, and the fact that he thinks they have a prayer of succeeding. The fact of the matter is that "the leaders" haven't failed this nation, they've sabotaged it. They are analogous to an enemy occupation force. Which means, logically, that they cannot be "pressured" into anything, much less surrendering power voluntarily, no matter how loud and widespread the "civil uprisings" demanding it. To the contrary, that's only likely to hasten an American version of Tianenmen Square.
He also doesn't even recognize who the enemy is:
The other administration officials he's calling for the forced resignation of are, Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY., House Speaker John Boehner, R-OH8, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA8.
I'm sure Reid, Pelosi, McConnell, and Boehner would be surprised to learn that they are both members of Congress and "administration officials". Apparently the separation of powers problem is worse than even I imagined.
Well, maybe Crazy Nancy wouldn't be. And I'd say that's about right.
Why is it I still have to ask what the hell Boehner and McConnell have to do with the laying waste of America? They've been doing their best to slow it down in heavily outnumbered political combat, last I checked - and I check often. But let's assume Vallely's idiotically indiscriminate premise, just for giggles; and let's also assume that his silly strategy could actually "get the job done" - who would take their places in those leadership positions? Assuming all the [snicker] "forced resignations" took place at the same time, that would put Eric Cantor in the White House, with, perhaps, Paul Ryan as either his appointed veep or as the new House Speaker; Dick Durbin or Chucky Schumer would be the new Senate Majority Chisler, with John Cornyn as the new Senate Minority Leader; and, I guess, Steny Hoyer would become the new House Minority Leader. By General Vallely's lights, how would this be any improvement? And so would begin another round of "civil uprisings" to "force" their resignations, and so on into higgledy-piggledy absurdity.
The worst part of this is, a lot of Tea Partiers are going to go into orgasmic raptures over this nonsense.
Now let me reiterate: I would love to be able to force every Democrat to quit. Come up with a serious, viable way of making that happen and I'll be first in line. But there's a word for such notions: fantasy. And fantasy is what losing political movements descend or retreat into when they discover how difficult it is to "turn the country around" and can't accept that it's not easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy as they think it should be by sole virtue of the righteousness of their cause.
The Constitution, interestingly enough, provides a remedy for just such situations as the one in which we find ourselves: elections. As in, winning them. You want to "take the country back," that's how you do it. Which means you need to play the political game, accept that politics is a profession, and leave it to the professionals who know how to win elections, instead of the facile mythological indulgence of the "citizen-politician" that keeps kicking away chance after chance to actually attain the Tea Party's goals.
The other niggling detail is, elections preclude short-cuts and end-arounds like "civil uprisings" to "force" mass resignations of high office-holders. Because, as every right-winger should know, the Left has been, is, and always will be better than we are at such extra-democratic agitating. In addition to which is the extrapolation of General Vallely's exhortation: a back and forth ginnip-ginnop of election and "civil uprising" until the latter completely dispenses with the former. Pick whatever analogy you like - Greece, America in the 1850s, America in the 1960s, etc. - but that doesn't sound to me like a path that leads to the resurrection and strengthening of stable, healthy constitutional republicanism. As is always the case with any incarnation of revenge, there's no such thing as firing the last shot until one combatant or the other is dead.
None of the above is to say that General Vallely and whomever wishes to follow his lead don't have the First Amendment right to do so. They absolutely do. They just need to remember that none of their protests, none of their squalling, and none of their demands are going to make one single solitary bit of difference, and will actually get in the way of realizing what we all want to see.
Of course, Barack Obama is unlikely to permit any more elections anyway, which just means that the uprisings, when they come, will be far from civil.
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