What I want to know is how Self-Appointed Prosecutor Reynolds, ostensibly a law professor, would set up his case against the President if he were a Senator charged with trying the President in an impeachment trial. His answer:
By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated that oath. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace.
He won’t resign, of course. First, the President has the appreciation of free speech that one would expect from a Chicago Machine politician, which is to say, none. Second, he’s not getting any pressure. Indeed, the very press that went crazy over Ari Fleischer’s misrepresented remarks seems far less interested in the actions of an administration that I repeat, literally sent brown-shirted enforcers to launch a midnight knock on a filmmaker’s door.
But Obama’s behavior — and that of his enablers in the press — has laid down a marker for those who are paying attention. By these actions he is, I repeat, unfit to hold office. I hope and expect that the voters will agree in November.
Reynolds of course has no credibility on the subject of "actions that a President should resign over" given his relentless cheering of Bush the war criminal and destroyer of the US economy for 8 years. And as I said, the idea that a teaching law professor who has no effing clue how the Constitution actually works is just pathetic. The guy violated his probation. The cops want to talk to him, since the evidence of that is ALL OVER THE GORRAM NEWS. Janet Shan at The Moderate Voice reminds us of those probation terms:
Let me underscore the fact that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula pleaded no contest to bank fraud charges in 2010 and was banned from using computers or the Internet or using false identities as part of his sentence, according to the LA Times. So, what of the alias, Sam Bacile? How did he get the money to pay the crew, actors and actresses for the movie? This just plays into the narrative that the right wing will do anything to put an idiot in the White House at all costs, oblivious to facts and the truth.
The reality is that with Romney now clearly losing, the right is increasingly, shriekingly desperate to try to create a "scandal" that will somehow drive the President out of office. The right is coming loose now that they sense Romney's blood in the water. This has nothing to do with how the First Amendment really works, as Oliver Willis points out, but everything to do with trying to use magical thinking to save Romney's failed campaign:
These are the same people who insisted that protests against advertisers bankrolling Rush Limbaugh’s misogyny were somehow against free speech.
Except — we’ve got no government actions here to squelch speech. We don’t have a rehash of the Alien & Sedition Acts, or past U.S. government offenses that were in retrospect actual violations of the Constitution.
You have – to varying degrees – representatives of the government voicing their disagreement with some speech. But both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have made quite clear that in America we don’t have the power nor interest in using the government to censor speech.
It’s just not what we do.
So why the conservative freak out? In addition to America having a black, Democratic president, there’s a good chance now that America will re-elect that black, Democratic president. In large part this is thanks to the dud of a candidate the Republican party has selected yet again.
They think it's still 2010 when they can yell and scream about Obama the traitor and that the country will come and vote GOP. Except for the fact that in the last 20 months, the voters have seen very clearly the awful bargain they got in state after state and in the House by putting the GOP back in charge.
They're sick of them. And the wingers are terrified. They see it slipping away just like it happened in 2008. They will do anything to try to win now. Including idiocy like Reynolds's call for the President's resignation.
I call on Glenn Reynolds to resign his college teaching job. He clearly has no idea how American law or the Constitution works. See how this goes, Glenn?
Scott Erik Kaufman at LGM and Steven Taylor at Outside the Beltway are equally brutal to Hehindeedy Glenn here. Go read their takedowns of this blithering idiot as well.
The right has lost it completely at this point, and it shows.
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