It was only a matter of time…
The far right has already called Obama a socialist, a communist, and a fascist, among other names, and has compared him to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. So it should come as no surprise that the organized Impeach Obama movement is now underway — with a longtime conservative flamethrower at the helm.
Enough is enough. We’re calling for the Impeachment of Barack Hussein Obama. And if you agree, you can join us right now.
That message greets visitors to ImpeachObamaCampaign.com, a slickly produced site that features frequent gratuitous use of the president’s middle name, ominous photos that seem designed to accentuate his African features — and an impeachment petition.
The effort is led, publicly, by Floyd Brown, a former GOP activist best-known for producing the Willie Horton ad that helped scupper Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential bid, and who pushed for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as early as 1994 — long before Clinton ever laid eyes on Monica Lewinsky.
But Brown — who George Stephanopoulos once called “a slimy thug for hire” — portrays Clinton as a giant next to Obama. “In hindsight, I long for the days of the Bill Clinton presidency,” he said in an interview with TPMmuckraker. “Bill Clinton was ten times the president Obama will ever be.”
The new campaign, which teamed with World Net Daily for its launch yesterday, is technically a project of the Policy Issues Institute (PII), a blandly named advocacy organization run by Brown and James Lacy, a southern California election lawyer. PII’s registered address is the same as that of the three-person law firm run by Lacy, his wife Janice Lacy — whose bio says she’s a former deputy counsel for the Republican National Committee — and a third person, William Wewer.
This isn’t Brown and James Lacy’s first collaboration. Last year, they teamed up on several right-wing oppo-research outfits that tried hard to Swift Boat Obama’s presidential run. One ad produced by their “National Campaign Fund” sought to tie Obama, Drudge-style, to gang violence in Chicago, noting that as a state senator he had opposed the death penalty for gang-related murders.
The new effort might be described as part of Brown’s campaign to define impeachment down. On the homepage of the new site, Brown argues that the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” — the circumstances justifying impeachment, according to the constitution — doesn’t mean crimes in a legal sense. Rather, it refers simply to “bad behavior.”
Talking to TPMmuckraker, Brown elaborated on that view. Properly understood, he said, impeachment is “like a recall in California” — a political act. “It’s a process by which you remove an incompetent president.”
By that — perhaps low — standard, Brown argued, Obama more than qualifies. “He’s basically handed our foreign policy off to the United Nations. His economic policies are destroying the value of the dollar.”
“He’s in over his head,” Brown continued. “I am fearful for my country for the first time in my adult life.”
Asked about the site’s frequent use of the president’s middle name, Brown offered the defense that Obama himself had used it, during the swearing-in ceremony at his inauguration.
Brown said the campaign had plans for other activities beyond the website, but declined to elaborate. Asked about the effort’s financial backing, he said that he had built the website himself — Lacy, too, “has been supportive” he acknowledged — but that he expected that other sources of funding would soon materialize.
