Impeachment Fever: Catch It: Obama Made It All Up Edition

Whlep, after six years of impeachment chatter from our friends on the right, Obama finally started judoing them by using their own wingnuttery against them in fundraising campaigns. Out-maneuvered by the Antichrist-In-Chief yet again, the new GOP talking point is:

Obama made up all that impeachment stuff

Warning: there's Douthat on the other end of that link. Try not to get any on you...

Over there you'll also find more of the currently hot GOP gibbering point: ZOBAMA IZ TEH LAWLESS DICTATORZ!!!111

It's too bad that this is all playing out as it is. I tend to be against expansions of executive power. But the GOP, by having no real goals beyond obstructing Obama, has more-or-less forced him to take the kinds of actions he's contemplating on illegal immigration.*  Granting illegal aliens some temporary legal status seems to me to be a reasonable response to the current crisis. It, might, of course, make the problem worse in some important respects...but no one seems to have a better plan.

Anyway, unless I'm missing something here, here's how things have gone:

GOP starts chattering about impeachment before Obama is even elected
...
GOP makes destruction of Obama Job One
...
GOP shrieks about crisis at border.
GOP implements new impeachment-relevant talking point: Obama as lawless dictator!
GOP blames Obama for crisis at border
GOP refuses to pass bill addressing crisis at border
Obama contemplates executive action to address crisis at border
GOP "lawlessness" chatter intensifies
Obama uses GOP impeachment chatter as fundraising tool
GOP denies ever having heard anything about this...what is it? Im-peach-ment?
(Douthat's variation: and Obama made that all up...which, y'know...might just be an impeachable offense...)

Look, the Democratic party really does seem to me to be analogous to an asylum...but at least the doctors and orderlies are still in charge there, and the most dangerous and deluded patients are largely isolated and/or under control. But the GOP is similarly analogous...and over there, the lunatics are running the show.


* Sidebar: WTH is it with the national media continually talking about "anti-immigrant sentiment" with respect to illegal immigration? I've never met a single person in my life who was "anti-immigrant." What we have (mostly on the right--those guys aren't wrong about everything, you know) is anti-illegal-immigrant sentiment. Or, more properly and in most cases: anti-illegal-immigration sentiment. Or, again, more properly: an anti-illegal-immigration position. The repeated attempts to paint those who are concerned about illegal immigration as anti-immigration is loathsome. NPR is really bad about this, but the tendency is pretty widespread.