Even if you’ve been watching with only one eye and listening with only one ear, you must realize that the plot to impeach President Biden that you keep hearing about has absolutely no there there, nor here, nor anywhere. Sometimes you’ll even hear the GOP itself confess as much, directly or obliquely. Republicans are very shrewd at strategizing, because it’s all they do; their agenda is all about seizing, expanding and maintaining power, and nothing else. They sometimes admit that too. Fact is, while they are very adept at scheming and plotting, right-wingers tend to be terrible poker players, because they blurt things out so readily and flagrantly. And so it is with their bullshit impeachment drive. In at least ten ways, they have flashed their tells all over the house.

1. It was preordained

Although as of this writing the GOP is desperately thrashing about to find some excuse, any excuse, no excuse, to impeach the president, they’ve already blazoned it on the billboards some time ago that they don’t need any reason except that he’s a Democratic president — who, to make his sins even more grave, defeated their Orange God in the 2020 presidential election. Long before that election, before Biden even became the Democratic nominee, they made it clear that they were going to impeach the next Democratic president as retaliation for the first impeachment of Former Guy. And after his second impeachment, it became inevitable.

2. Sheer idolatry

Speaking of Former Guy, his boots are blindingly dazzling from all the licking they’ve received. It was he, in concert with Fox “News”, who egged on the GOPers to impeach Biden to settle his petulant grudge. And they’ve tried to redo history by insisting that his own impeachments were shams, and that he never really did anything wrong. And they try to frame Jan.6 as a peaceful protest, which nonetheless was instigated by BLM. Antifa, the FBI, the DOJ and George Soros to make MAGAnauts look violent (call it Schrödinger’s Riot), and the hundreds of MAGAnauts who have been arrested, and even those who have confessed, are innocent “hostages”. Anyone who has so much naked disregard for truth can’t be trusted to investigate anything. And to make matters even worse, many of these Republicans were themselves complicit in the insurrection.

3. Pick a lane, any lane

The ultimate in job security is the occupation of moving the goalposts for conservatives. If one excuse doesn’t work out, they always have another one ready to take the field. They’ve claimed that President Biden somehow benefited from his son’s business dealings — a lie. They’ve claimed that he’s refused to cooperate and turn over requested documents — a lie. They’ve claimed that the president arranged for law enforcement to give his son preferential treatment in the investigation of criminal charges against him — another lie. They’ve claimed that he interfered in the electoral process — another lie. They’ve claimed that he’s had an “open border” — a very obvious lie. (At the same time they tell it, they react in shock to the record volume of drugs being seized at this “open” border, apparently preferring that the drugs make it through.) And the latest, as of this writing, is that since his son refused to take part in a closed-door hearing (wisely so, since it’s clearly a trap to give them a green light to misrepresent the facts), and since the president knew he was going to refuse, that constitutes obstruction of “justice” on dad’s part. No, really.

4. Hunter and prey

You want to impeach the president, you’re going to investigate the president. Right? Not anymore. These days, it’s Hunter, Hunter, Hunter. There’s no square centimeter of his messy life that they’ve left unexamined. They’ve even exhibited his homemade porn on the floor of the House. Twice. All in the national interest, of course. Ostensibly, the purpose of all this is to establish that son somehow benefited from dad’s political influence, or dad somehow benefited improperly from son’s business dealings, or something like that. But since the notion of any such link has already been demolished, and yet they continue baiting Hunter anyway, they obviously have some other intent. And the most obvious intent they might have would be to cause the president additional mental anguish — which he’s already had plenty of in his life. Because they’re just really sweet Christian folk like that.

5. We don’t need no stinking evidence

“We have mountains of evidence”, they keep saying. These must be really solid mountains, because the GOPers have not been able to break loose even one little pebble to show anyone. Whenever they do, on rare occasions, condescend to reveal some of the Everest-sized glop of “proof” they’ve been tenaciously concealing, it turns out to be a dog turd instead of a gem. They breathtakingly produce “whistleblowers” who turn out to be, um, missing in action and on the lam from law enforcement, and “witnesses”, who turn up to admit that, well, no, they actually don’t have any evidence that the president did anything wrong. They hold every financial transaction of the Biden family of the past few years up to a bright light, hoping they can discover an uncrossed ‘t’ or undotted ‘i’ that will lead them down a glorious rabbit hole. This includes a repayment of a loan from father to son for the purchase of a truck, when Joe Biden did not hold any political office, in the staggering sum of (drumroll, please) $4180. Hunter repaid the loan, you see, and when his pa received that money back, that constituted improper benefit because of the son’s sixty degrees of separation from Chinese spies George Soros Bugs Bunny, and how dare he accept repayment of a loan, so there you have it, case closed.

6. Behind the curtain

It wasn’t just a careless oversight by the Oversight folks that they neglected to mention what that loan repayment was for and what the sum was. It was a deliberate effort to make a mountain of evidence out of a molehill of nothing. That’s been the consistent pattern — keeping their “evidence” as secret as possible, so nobody can see the three-egg omelette on their faces. Their insistence on a closed-door hearing with Hunter Biden wasn’t exactly because they want to promote transparency in government. How can we be so sure they want to distort whatever Hunter tells them? For one thing, that’s already what they did with closed-door testimony presented by his former business associate Devon Archer. Surely they wouldn’t do the same thing again, would they? Surely not.

7. Wearing their…somethings… on their sleeves

Although they’ve consistently tried to conduct their shenanigans in a dark chamber, they’ve shouted their motives and objectives from the rooftops. Their priority, they will tell you unabashedly, is to impeach Joe Biden, no matter what. The House Oversight Committee website actually had a heading called the “Biden Criminal Investigation”– a phrase it has brandished repeatedly on the site and elsewhere. This is an official government website operating as a propaganda arm of the Fox Party at taxpayer expense. When chairman James Comer, in one of his numerous appearances on right-wing media, was confronted with the utter lack of evidence to support an impeachment, and asked whether he believed he’d actually be able to find something, he replied, “I sure hope so”. If you’re really interested in pursuing Truth and Justice and The American Way, you’re not going to “sure hope” that your president committed a crime; what you’re going to hope is that you find the truth. But Comer freely gave away his game.

8. For thee but not for me

So if the Republicans are sniffing out every one of Hunter Biden’s farts when he was in second grade in an effort to prove that his dad bites the heads off live chickens, they’re certainly going to go after genuine criminal activity tooth and nail, eh? Don’t bet the deed to Mar-A-Lago. They already had a chance to go after grotesque nefariousness tooth and nail and they consistently sided with the offenders instead. Twice they voted against holding Former Guy accountable for his crimes.

And lest we forget, Former Guy has kids too. One of whom, along with his son-in-law, actually held positions in their patriarch’s administration. During which time they used their power and influence to rake in, shall we say, more than 4180 dollars. But how much interest have Republicans shown in investigating these transactions? Absolutely zero. In fact, James “Accountability” Comer killed the Democratic-initiated inquiry into Kushner early in his tenure.

Meanwhile, while Congressional Republicans were pretending to ferret out presidential wrongdoing, Democrats were actually doing it; but the president in question was not Biden, but his predecessor. Democrats uncovered an actual mountain of evidence that he had pocketed many millions from foreign governments — including, yes, China — while he was in office. But the Oversight (sic) Committe shrugged it off. They were too busy impeaching Biden for being falsely accused of the same thing.

At one point during the impeachment circus, Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) took the floor and asked a show of hands to indicate how many of his colleagues believed that both Hunter Biden and Florida Man should be held accountable if they were convicted of crimes. (IF THEY WERE CONVICTED OF CRIMES, mind you.) Not a single Republican was willing to raise their hand. Tells you all you need to know.

9. Backup impeachment

In case the vendetta against Biden falls through, the Republicans have a plan B to satisfy the impeachment lust of their base: Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security. In this case, though, they’re not even pretending to be pretending to search for acts of malfeasance. They’re just saying they want to remove him from office because he’s failing at his job (like a large number of Congresspersons we could name). As a result, they aver, there’s an “invasion” of the brown-skinned menace at the southern border. And they really, really want this to be true, because it’s such a cool fearmongering ploy to campaign on. In fact, these same GOPers who are so up in arms about border security have steadfastly refused to agree to Biden’s plan to beef up border funding, because they really really want him to fail.

10. All in the timing

But let’s be extremely generous in playing devil’s advocate for a moment, and pretend that all of the GOP’s batshit conspiracy theories and wild-eyed accusations about the president are perfectly true. The fact remains that they are trying to impeach him for things he supposedly did BEFORE he became president — and AFTER he was vice president. in other words, when he was a civilian like you and me. Is that really how impeachment is supposed to work? Well, it’s true the Constitution doesn’t specify that those “high crimes and misdemeanors” must have been committed while in office. But it’s hard to believe that the Founders intended otherwise. If so, that means that a president can be impeached for something he allegedly did decades ago — after the statute of limitations has expired, or even after he’s already served time in prison and/ or has been pardoned. In other words, it would mean that a president could be impeached for something that he could not even be tried for as a civilian. But hey, who cares when you’re the GOP with a majority in the House and thus can write your own rules.

Despite all of this, there is absolutely zero doubt that the GQP will impeach the president if they can muster the votes by hook or crook. And it’s certain that once they’re done with the impeachment one way or another, they’ll begin a second one. Because the Orange God had two, so they think they’re entitled to score two as well. At least two; they very well might go for a third just to for one-upsmanship. That’s just how their evil, twisted, puerile, reptilian little brains function.