Why No One Cares About The Biden Impeachment

There was a time in American history – around 36 months ago – when articles of impeachment against a United States president was a Big Fucking Deal, a Thing That Demands Attention.

It meant the president had done something extraordinarily illegal and was deemed no longer fit for office even by the warped, eye-wateringly corrupt standards of Washington, D.C. It meant Congress had been forced to do its job and hold another branch of the government accountable – a heartening development considering the judicial branch is utterly unaccountable and corruption has been legalized in the congressional branch.

Impeachment usually means elected officials had to take a little time off from groveling before oil companies and pharmaceutical companies and billionaire psychopaths determining the future of humanity from the flying deck of their third super-yacht to actually do some business.  

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The current impeachment process – the one targeting Joe Biden – is pure political theater, and boring theater at that. No one cares that radicalized House Republicans are trying to impeach Biden as he seeks a second term in the White House. The whole charade barely registers in the national consciousness because it’s a total sham, a waste of our attention, and dripping with the worst faith possible.

Biden’s impeachment is the epitome of bad faith politics, clear enough even for normies and bothsides-obsessed media outlets to recognize. Republicans aren’t even pretending to act in good faith anymore. It’s sad. I’ve always enjoyed the little game where conservatives pretend to care about something and we are all expected to fall for it and say, oh dear, this Thing You Care About is a legitimate political issue that deserves all the attention of a real political issue.

House Republicans last week called a few witnesses in their low-T impeachment inquiry. Maybe you didn’t know this because, again, it’s a non-story and no one gives a fucking shit about it. The tough thing for House Republicans is that all three witnesses called to testify about the Biden Crime Family or whatever right-wing losers are saying around the dinner table these days said there was nothing to see here – that lawmakers were wasting their time on a pointless “investigation” while the country crumbles and falls headlong into the grips of full-blown fascism, which is worse than regular fascism because, again, it’s full blown.

"I have previously stated that, while I believe that an impeachment inquiry is warranted, I do not believe that the evidence currently meets the standard of a high crime and misdemeanor needed for an article of impeachment,” Jonathan Turley, a right-wing lawyer and an expert is ratfucking the shit out of Democratic lawmakers, told Republicans in last week’s testimony. “The purpose of my testimony today is to discuss how past inquiries pursued evidence of potentially impeachable conduct."

That’s high comedy, I don’t care who you are. Turley, who has helped lay the legal groundwork for every awful Republican policy of the past thirty years and who has presented straight-faced legal arguments justifying Donald Trump’s laughably obvious corruption, outright said there’s nothing to see in the search for a reason to unseat Joe Biden.  Not even Turley – whose DNA is 69 percent bad faith and who has exactly zero scruples with which to deal – couldn’t do the dance and pretend there’s justification for moving forward with Biden’s impeachment.

Bruce Dubinsky, who calls himself a “certified fraud examiner” and, on X, seems mad about being fucked out of a bunch of money by crypto grifters, told members of Congress during last week’s hearing: "I am not here today to even suggest that there was corruption, fraud or wrongdoing. More information needs to be gathered before I can make such an assessment."

There’s not nothing here. There’s less than nothing here. That Joe Biden’s malcontent of a son, struggling with addiction following the death of his older brother and the heir to the Biden political throne, got mixed up with shady business deals and does drugs with sex workers is a never-ending point of fascination on the right, but utterly meaningless to normies who do most of the voting in presidential elections. Only frothing, red-pilled maniacs who have lost custody of their children and have been told in no uncertain terms to stay away from Thanksgiving dinner go around fretting about Hunter fucking Biden. No one else cares, nor should they.

It’s encouraging in a way, this profound lack of interest in a congressional impeachment inquiry. That no one gives a damn about the whole two-bit, Republican-orchestrated show means, maybe, that Americans are finally seeing conservative bad faith for what it is. After years and years of the fake Benghazi investigation meant to damage Hillary Clinton’s ascent to the White House, and after the fake Obama-era “fast and furious” investigation, perhaps voters and, importantly, media outlets are seeing Republican fuckery clearly.

Why are Republicans making all this effort to impeach Biden? The reason, unsurprisingly, is steeped in bad faith. Big Daddy Trump told them to impeach Biden so that when the two men run against each other in 2024, conservatives can point to Biden's impeachment and say, look everyone, he's no angel either. Our guy is the devil incarnate, a sociopath without a single redeeming quality, but your guy was impeached too! Both presidential candidates would have had the dishonor of being impeached, so the right could present its only remaining argument to the voting public: Good and bad things are exactly alike, you idiots, you fucking morons.

It could be that the stakes have been raised to such a panic-inducing point that Americans have to start recognizing Republican bad faith if we are going to survive as a republic. The realization that the next time Republicans win the White House will mark the end of the American experiment means there can’t be anymore fucking around with political games that make for good stories but create a false and dangerous bothsidesism that creates the kind of nihilism we saw in the run-up to the 2016 election, with selfish idiots casting votes for third party candidates because they had not been properly coddled by the Clinton campaign (which was an abject disaster, maybe the worst in the history of the western world).

The lack of public interest in the Biden impeachment situation gives me some hope that the right’s faith has become so wretchedly bad that even folks who can’t be bothered to care about politics recognize it as unworthy of their attention.

That Time A Fake Impeachment Worked

Long before we assumed everything the right does is in bad faith, liberals and lefties and normies and journalists alike took very seriously the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. House Republicans impeached Clinton not for whipping his fascist followers into a murderous frenzy at the Capitol, not for abusing his power, but for lying about getting a BJ from a staffer.

The feigned outrage over Clinton’s lies were especially precious coming from the biggest sex freaks on the planet: Washington Republicans. These are people doing unspeakable things to each other, their staffers, and anyone with a pulse any time they’re not in the halls of Congress, acting regal and respectable, dressed so nicely while that bum John Fetterman sometimes wears shorts. We all but got confirmation that official Washington is a sprawling sex cult when nazi Congressman Madison Cawthorn was fucked to high heaven by the GOP for accidentally exposing said cult.

And these people were horrified that Bill Clinton, an infamous philanderer for decades before winning the presidency, got a little weird with a member of his staff.

I was fifteen at the time, in tenth grade, and I recall my Republican relatives literally crying over Clinton’s lies during Thanksgiving dinner. These people had tears streaming down their faces over the president receiving oral sex and not wanting to tell the entire country about it. You cannot be serious, I thought back then. And I was no Clinton apologist. All I knew about the guy was that my dad and his friends were OK with him because the economy was good and Clinton seemed to be just racist enough for their liking. Clinton’s wife they could do without; she operated too much like a man, wearing pants and whatnot. But the consensus among normies was that Clinton had done a good-enough job as caretaker of the Reagan Revolution in its second decade (Barack Obama also served as caretaker, but he was black, so, you know).

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Back to the tears over turkey and gravy and the driest, most tasteless mashed potatoes you’ve ever tasted: These people had bought so deeply into the bad faith necessary to get worked up about Clinton’s so-called crimes that they were breaking down in front of family members. No one cried on Thanksgiving 2001, sixty days after the twin towers fell and the Pentagon was blown up. But Slick Willy being untruthful about some sex stuff: That called for waterworks.

The Clinton impeachment was the first time I recognized bad faith, even if I had no idea what to call it or how to define it. All I knew was that my family members could not have seriously been that upset about Bill Clinton’s lies. It was impossible. The only reason to act mad or sad or whatever was to achieve something politically – namely, exacting massive political pain and trying to remove a president who they did not care for and who had won re-election in a landslide.

Probably the Biden impeachment bullshit won’t go as far as Clinton’s. It likely won’t get buy-in from vulnerable Republican House members ahead of 2024, and it will certainly be killed in the divided Senate. Even so, it’s remarkable that Republicans have followed the orders of Trump and online broken brains who insist Joe Biden is the head of a sophisticated international crime ring.

With enough good faith, one can see this is pure projection about Trump, who is actually the head of a sophisticated international crime ring. Nevertheless, we persist.

Follow Denny Carter on X and Threads at @CDCarter13. He's on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social.