Had a senior EU diplomat, old friend, ask me today, “How does your impeachment work? My government believes Obama is quite mentally unwell.” — John Schindler (@20committee) October 12, 2015

So Vladimir Putin is calling Barack Obama a mush-for-brains and now this?

John Schindler’s tweet got Warner Todd Huston to note at Western Journalism:

This is a stunning comment because it wasn’t a personal opinion. It notes that a government thinks that Obama is mentally ill. It isn’t surprising that a foreigner might be confused over our impeachment process, though. Many Americans are also confused over the scheme. But impeachment isn’t really a strictly legal process. The fact is, impeachment is far more a political action than it is a legal one, and there has to be a political will on the part of Congress to go into the process of impeachment to start with.

In the wake of Obama’s interview with Steve Kroft, on Monday I wondered in all seriousness if Obama was delusional. On Tuesday’s Trifecta segment, I even asked Bill Whittle if the president’s apparent disconnect from reality was grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment, which is probably more relevant to the current situation than impeachment is.

Read Section 4:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Section 4 is in essence a legalized palace coup against a sitting president, headed up by the veep and a majority of cabinet officers. The amendment itself was written hastily in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The fear then was what if Kennedy had lived — but braindead? There had to be way, in the nuclear age, to quickly devolve power from an incapable President.

But what if the situation is something less than a president lying braindead in a Dallas hospital? What if the president is just fucking nuts, or “quite mentally unwell,” as at least one foreign government believes?

Surely then Section 4 would be a legal solution, but hardly a viable one. Vice President Joe Biden is reportedly “dumb as an ashtray,” and seems to lack the ambition to take on a former secretary of State, much less a sitting president. And Obama’s cabinet officers seem to have been picked for their fealty to Obama rather than for their devotion to the commonweal.

This palace simply will not coup, meaning that we and the world are stuck for the time being with a president with little awareness of the reality outside of his bubble, and no desire to learn.