Abuse of power?

What a joke.

Impeachment over a Ukrainian phone call the transcript of which everyone can read?

Bigger joke. On us, unfortunately.

If you want an example of real presidential abuse of power — and not the fake Democratic version — you need to look at Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson and the questionable Tonkin Gulf Resolution that he used in 1964 to get us into the miserable Vietnam War. He lied; American boys died, 58,120 of them.

No Americans were killed in the Ukraine, although a few got rich. Donald Trump was not one of them. Nobody was even wounded, except for Hunter Biden.

Johnson was not impeached for his lies, obfuscation and abuse of power, however. That is because the Congress was a party to the deadly hoax when it approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that got us into that war.

It was a resolution based on a hazy and unverifiable incident that allegedly took place in August 1964 when North Vietnamese patrol boats allegedly attacked two U.S. destroyers patrolling the Vietnamese coast.

There was no proof that the incident happened. Neither destroyer was hit. There were no casualties. There was serious doubt that there was an attack in the first place.

Critics charged that the incident was fake, and that Johnson knew it. The “attack” had been fabricated to get the U.S. involved militarily to save South Vietnam from a Communist takeover by the North Vietnamese.

It worked. We got in the war but did not save the country. We thrashed it instead, and in the process thrashed ourselves.

The U.S. had no army in Vietnam at the time, only a handful of military trainers with the South Vietnamese Army.

Johnson, itching for a fight, took to television to expand on the incident, promising “to bring about the end of of communist subversion and aggression in the area.”

Johnson, who became president upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, was seeking election to a full term in 1964. A popular and winnable war was a key to victory. Only it did not work out that way.

In August 1965, he sent in two battalions of U.S. Marines. By 1967-1968, at the height of the war, the U.S. had more than 500,000 soldiers, mostly draftees, in the country fighting a faraway war that we should not have been in and could not win, not with the strategy we used. Most Americans quickly opposed the war.

“You’re losing this war, mate,” veteran Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, a New Zealand native who had covered the war from the beginning, said to me one brutally hot day. We were at a small village outside Bien Hoa. It was March 1967. I was a newcomer to the war that Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize winner, had been covering from the beginning.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“I count the body bags,” he said.

Back home, angry anti-war demonstrators and Johnson became furious as American combat deaths mounted. College campuses erupted; young men tore up their draft cards. Some fled to Canada. Riots took place, bombs went off and cities burned. Demonstrators hauntingly chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how any kids did you kill today?

Washington politicians, checking the way the anti-war winds were blowing, began to stand up to Johnson and oppose the war, but nobody moved for impeachment. Johnson was a strong and vindictive president and politicians feared him.

There really was no need to impeach him anyway. He was on his way out. That is because the people opposed to the war conducted their own impeachment proceedings in the streets through protests and demonstrations.

The people voted with their feet. By 1968, all hopes of Johnson running for re-election were dashed. He was a broken president and a broken man. The people had spoken without a vote being cast in Congress.

On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he would not seek re-election.

If any president deserved to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, it was Johnson. That war, conceived, waged and pursued with lies, deceit and disinformation cost the lives of many young Americans and did untold damage to the country. Impeachment was designed to hold presidents like Johnson accountable. Yet, he walked.

And the Democrats, consumed with hate, last week impeached Donald Trump for what amounts to running a red light. No wonder most of the county shrugged.