Jack Kingston of Georgia used to be your run-of-the-mill stalwartof the Silly Party. Now, though, he's getting a little jumped-up, and he's running for the Senate and, well, he's decided to, you know, go there.

In an interview with Aaron McCready, a metro Atlanta resident who hosts his own Internet-based talk show (Ed Note: Already we have gone too far upriver ever to return), it went down like this:

Kingston: I do think that the move by John Boehner in terms of suing the president is the right step...I think he's done plenty wrong for a lawsuit. Not a day goes by when people don't talk to us about impeachment. I don't know what rises to that level yet, but I know that there's a mounting frustration that a lot of people are getting to and I think Congress is going to start looking at it very seriously.

Not to disagree with Jay Bookman too strenuously, but the Republicans "legitimized impeachment" as a tool of partisan politics in 1998. People talked about impeaching Bill Clinton for years; aides to Tom Delay were openly telling reporters in Washington, after the Republican sweep in the 1994 midterms, that they could impeach Clinton any time they wanted. Ann Coulter wrote a book arguing that impeachment was essentially a political act that a congressional majority could undertake just because they had the votes to do so. Bob Barr wrote a book advocating Clinton's impeachment long before anyone had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky. The fact is that impeachment -- or to be more precise, the threat of impeachment -- was a political tactic already at hand to the Republicans any time they wanted to use it. Criminalizing the simple election of a Democratic president was a club that was already in the bag.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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