To impeach, or not to impeach

[pbrower2a]

It is easy to misunderstand and misinterpret history even with the tool of generational theory. Some of us thought that September 11, 2001 was the start of a Crisis and expected to see rationing, exhortations to buy war bonds, calls to reduce consumer spending, mass enlistments even of prominent people in the Armed Services, and large numbers of people trying to do public duty in war plants. Things did not so work; we instead got a speculative boom that, like others, turned investments into garbage.  We did not have anything like a Crisis era until Americans had cause to fear an economic meltdown as severe as the one that started the Great Depression.  Speculative booms going bust are the financial panics (1857, 1929, 2008) that portend calamity. Four years after the Panic of 1857 the USA was in the Civil War. Within three years of the Great Market Crash of 1929, Germany would go from a benign-but-shaky Weimar Republic to one of the most brutal and aggressive tyrannies ever known. 

So something was different in 2008. Americans were scared of things spiraling into consummate danger with a combination of political chaos in an era of atomic weapons seemingly everywhere. So the chief of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission told the President and Congress what was going to happen, and everybody seemed to go along. Americans elected Barack Obama in a near-landslide, and by the spring of 2009 the hemorrhage of securities prices was over/ The recovery had begun

Obama did everything well in stewardship of the economy -- well enough to allow the sorts of people who lost enough that they could not afford to buy the political process to buy the political process. By 2010 the right-wing economic interests had the funds with which to fund an onslaught upon anything not fully in line with pure plutocracy. Obama's party lost the House of Representatives in 2010. He got re-elected in 2012 despite the vehement efforts of the Right, but the Right won the Senate in 2014 and got the Presidency in 2016 with a political neophyte with despotic tendencies. Meanwhile the Right got control of many state legislatures, a telling marker of which was that Michigan became a Right-to-Work (or as I am tempted to call it, "Duty to Starve") state, demonstrating the increasing power of Big Business over all else in America.

OK. Trump is certifiably awful as President. He is the most immoral person to have ever held the office. He does not understand the Constitutional limits upon the Presidency. Oblivious to the normal methods of getting one's pet legislation enacted and appointments confirmed, he turns to the use of brute partisanship.

In 2018 he loses the House of Representatives, and it can hold him accountable for gross misconduct. 

Here we are.