Answering a Question That Isn't Being Asked

This is called framing the argument:

But this is my point: utter madness is what today’s Republicans do. You can present to me every logical argument you desire. Benghazi at the end of the day was a terrible tragedy in which mistakes, bad mistakes, were certainly made, and in which confusion and the CYA reflex led to some bad information going out to the public initially, but none of this remotely rises to the level of high crime. The IRS cock-up was just that, a mistake by a regional office.

That's the voice of Michael Tomasky, an ace purveyor of conventional wisdom, emoting about the possibility that Republicans are gonna try to impeach Barack Obama. It's almost nostalgic, the "doesn't rise to the level high crime" stuff that we heard over and over again, 15 years ago now, when ol' Bill Clinton was in office. Those rat bastard Republicans are at it again!

Ann Althouse makes the salient point:

Why do people say "logic" when they are obviously not talking about logic? He's talking about what the facts are, how to characterize the facts, and what the standard for impeachment is. None of that is pinned down. We always only have evidence of what the facts are, and currently we don't even have all the evidence of the facts. Whether the facts say "tragedy" and "confusion" and "mistakes" or something more nefarious hasn't been resolved.

I suppose there's someone, somewhere, calling for Obama to be impeached. There's no reason to believe it would ever happen, because:

• Harry Reid would stop any effort in the Senate cold; and
• If Obama were removed from office, Joe Biden would be president, and that would hardly be an improvement

My interest in Benghazi and whatever happened with the IRS is actually pretty simple -- I want to find out the truth. There are any number of questions that we haven't even approached yet. With respect to Benghazi, we need to find out (a) why Ambassador Stevens was there, especially since he had to know that he wasn't going to be protected; and (b) who decided to make the Nakoula video the key talking point that Susan Rice offered on the Sunday talk shows, and why. I have my guesses on both questions, but they are only guesses. It would be better to know the truth.

And as for those who are squawking about this being an effort to "get" Hillary Clinton, I'd say this: I don't much care about her, or her ambitions. If she's implicated in something that destroys her chance to run for president in 2016, too bad. One would think that the Democrats would have little difficulty finding another candidate to be their standard bearer.