WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM.

It's a springtime for scandal in D.C., and most of the brethren are luxuriating in it. But there's a weird nervousness to their energy, and I think I see where it's coming from. DaTechGuy:

As a criminal investigation begins we’ve seen some the “I” word, Impeachment thrown about.

Now a lot of that is on twitter, but that’s no big deal, a lot of words are thrown about on twitter, but some of it has been thrown around in the press.

The funny thing is a lot of the people doing so are of the left,

This is not an accident, the left understand that talk of impeachment now would be a disaster, not to the president, but to those building the case against him.

He then tells us a story from Tip O'Neill's autobiography about how, back in Nixontime, Rep. Robert Drinan's early impeachment bill was briefly an impediment to the later successful impeachment drive, and comments:

I’ll wager not too may members of the Tea Party have read O’Neill’s book, nor GOP members of congress but I’ll wager plenty of people on the left have. They understand that if the GOP moves early, before democrats are on board, it becomes a party issue so they are going to do their best to force our hand before the facts are in evidence.

I don't know what's crazier -- that he thinks The Left is trying to protect Obama by talking about impeaching him (are Rep. Jason Chaffetz and all the other wingnuts talking about it double agents, then?), or that he thinks we all read Tip O'Neill's autobiography. (I guess nobody told him we only read Alinsky and porn.)

Over at National Review, the excitable Charles C.W. Cooke has an article celebrating the traditional conservative distrust of government, but goes a great deal further than the usual arghblargh. He calls the Founders' writings on the subject "codified paranoia" and seems to mean it positively ("and America is better off for it"); in fact, his article is called "In Praise of Paranoia." He affects to believe the recent IRS fuckup is "government tyranny" and says, "the IRS has done America a considerable favor... Next time an authoritarian [!!] explains how, say, a national gun registry will be just swell — and labels its naysayers as neurotic — his opponents will have a new and useful shorthand: 'IRS scandal.'" (For this analogy with the Tea Party scam to be perfect, actually, the people trying to get guns would have be intending to murder someone with them, and the tyranny would be that some of them would be delayed by the government in doing so.)

Later, chatting about his essay with friends, Cooke adds:

Odd as it might sound, having a sizeable portion of the population reflexively take the view that the government would hurt them if it could is, I think, a good thing. There are no black helicopters and there may never be any black helicopters. But isn’t it positive that people are worried about them?

Cooke has said some pretty crazy things on this head before, but now reveals himself quite literally committed to irrationality. I don't think he's the only one. For years they've cherished this dream, and now something shimmering in the distance convinces them that it's come true. They've been waiting for Amok Time so long that they can't even hold back enough to make it look good.