When the man’s right, he’s right. Byron York had a nifty piece this weekend about the Dems’ strategy here: The more they dangle “impeachment” red meat in front of their base, the more dumb grassroots liberals start slobbering money to beat back the phantom Republican threat. They’ve raised more than $2 million in four days this way, the single biggest haul of the 2014 cycle so far. And there’s no signs they’re slowing down. Steny Hoyer belched out a warning this morning that Boehner’s lawsuit, which is obviously an alternative to impeachment, might just be a prelude to it. Then Louise Slaughter chimed in:

“Republicans desperately want to do impeachment,” Slaughter said at a press briefing in the Capitol. “They’re going to take this step first [the lawsuit], but I’m not in any way assuaged from the notion that impeachment is not the final goal here.”…

“We have no plan to impeach the president,” Boehner told reporters.

Told of Boehner’s comments, Slaughter remained unconvinced.

“You’ve heard all their base and everybody yelling about it,” she said. “For him to say that I think is disingenuous.”

Annnnd, just for good measure, here’s two cents from King Troll as well:

“Isn’t it good we’re talking about this [VA bill] rather than impeachment of the president or suing the president?” [Harry] Reid said of the veterans’ deal. “The American people are totally opposed to this, we shouldn’t be off on those tracks of impeachment, suing the president. We should be legislating.”

Glenn Beck compared the lefty shrieking over impeachment yesterday to the shrieking over Birtherism: There are people on the right who subscribe to both, but the closer you get to the two parties’ respective leaderships, the more you find Democrats are much more eager to talk about each topic than Republicans are. That’s a function of simple political cost/benefit calculations, and right now, Democratic fundraisers are benefiting handsomely.

But … what if there’s more to it than money? Charles Cooke made a sharp point earlier about impeachmentpalooza:

This post by Yuval Levin worries me: http://t.co/WR4z6Uqyly. You have to wonder whether the administration and its friends are talking . . .

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 29, 2014

. . . about impeachment now—in a vacuum—so that when they do something truly terrible and impeachment-worthy they can say “we told you . . .

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 29, 2014

. . . they wanted to impeach him" and make it seem as if it was inevitable, rather than the direct result of an unprecedented power-grab.

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 29, 2014

The Levin piece he links says Obama’s looming executive amnesty for illegals “could well be the most extreme act of executive overreach ever attempted by an American president in peacetime.” That being so, Cooke wonders, maybe all the impeachment chatter lately is simply a sly Democratic attempt to inoculate Obama from what’s coming when he finally pulls the trigger on amnesty. If they convince people that these darned Republicans are crazy to want to oust O, and then O does something legitimately impeachment-worthy, what’s the Republican play then? If they act, they’re simply “proving” that Democrats were right about their craziness all along. This is where we are now as a country, maybe — somehow, given a choice between a quixotic impeachment attempt and an unprecedented power grab by the executive in the name of “doing good,” the latter is seen as the lesser of two evils.

Cooke’s theory depends, though, on the idea that the GOP really might go ahead and try to impeach O if he follows through on amnesty if not for all the impeachment talk lately. Is that true? I’m skeptical that O needs to be “inoculated” because I don’t believe for a second that Boehner would risk alienating Latinos by impeaching him for handing out legalization to illegals like candy. On the contrary, my hunch is that Boehner will react by huddling with his team and deciding that they must, must pass comprehensive immigration reform next year to make sure that they don’t end up being outpandered by the White House among Latino voters before 2016. Obama’s already immune from political illness from this, at least within that demographic. Independents are, perhaps, another question.