I’m not convinced that any of President Obama’s recent scandal eruptions constitute an “impeachable moment.” But surely something’s gone wrong with our constitutional culture when opinion leaders treat the very invocation of the “I-word” as akin to screaming obscenities in a church. …

“Harder”? We’ve impeached a total of two presidents in our 224-year constitutional history: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton (Richard Nixon resigned before the full House had a chance to vote on articles of impeachment). Let’s be charitable and call it three. The question that should have occurred to Etzioni is, if we only manage to impeach a president once every 75 years or so, just how easy can it be? …

“People may be starting to use the I-word before too long,” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said last week in relation to the Benghazi scandal. But impeachment talk is relegated to the fringes of the Republican Party, and it’s usually invoked for the wrong reasons. The real Benghazi scandal is how we got there in the first place. The president launched an illegal war in a country that his own secretary of defense admitted wasn’t “a vital interest” for the United States.

One thing is clear, however: Given the massive abuses of power and public trust that modern presidents have committed, we’ve had far too few presidential impeachments. We should stop treating the “I-word” like it’s a curse.