Endgame: Should the Avengers Impeach Thanos?

At the start of Nixon’s impeachment proceedings most of the Senate was against convicting him. The proceedings are part of the way to change attitudes and create momentum.

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And comic strips aren’t the same as encyclopedia articles.

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Also, Clinton was impeached for lying about and trying to cover up an extramarital affair. Lying under oath is illegal, but I hope that everyone who can think can recognize an impeachment that is purely for political purposes, and one that is also actually about issues that are materially relevant to the welfare of the country.

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Clinton wasn’t weakened by impeachment – the 1998 mid-terms were a referendum on the impeachment and he gained seats. He was weakened by the Monica Lewinsky scandal; the subsequent impeachment added nothing.

I don’t think impeachment right now would weaken Trump much, nor would it “embolden” his supporters. But impeachment at the correct time could significantly damage him, maybe even make him quit. When is the correct time? Not sure, but we didn’t rush to impeachment with Nixon (never even quite getting there) and we got rid of him anyway.

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Impeachment is like charging the accused of a crime, not prosecuting them for it. If necessary, the House can impeach for multiple charges, or impeach multiple times for different charges. They can impeach him now for obstruction (considering that was one of the charges that Clinton was impeached on, for which there was negligible cause or evidence, one could say that impeachment of Trump for obstruction is imperative), then impeach him again later if they find something nasty in his finances. So, when it comes to timing, how about now and later?

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Hawkeye is a formidable spy/assassin/vigilante but he never really should have signed up with a team of super-beings with godlike powers if he didn’t want to look kind of silly by comparison. It’s like drafting the best middle-school basketball player in the county for the Harlem Globetrotters.

Think about it: his lone contribution to stopping Thanos was when he tried and failed to sacrifice himself to save Black Widow.

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The only step more emboldened that they can get at this point is full on war and if we’re at that point it is a question of pretext rather than cause. It isn’t likely to cost votes because anyone outraged by his impeachment was already off the table for any other candidate. In contrast, fostering a culture of impunity is a huge mistake that is unhealthy for the Republic in the long run.

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Dude…

You’re still giving Hawkeye shit for not being a god, a mutant or superpowered in some way?

I have to think that when Hawkeye initially signed up for SHIELD, he had no freakin’ idea that aliens, magic, etc even existed yet… just like most of the planet.

Then after the Snappening, that he was even willing to sacrifice himself at all is more than most regular people would do.

And his PTSD from losing his whole family turned him Ronin, a vigilante badass mercilessly killing bad guys for the next 5 years… whereas an actual god like Thor went all ‘Lebowski’ behind his PTSD.

Long story short, Clinton Barton isn’t a supe; that goes without saying.
But he still does the best with what he has, even in the face of utter hopelessness. Which, again, is way more than can be said about the average joe in the MCU, or in the actual reality that we live in.

Not to mention, the narrative for the original Avengers is now technically over; it’s time to do an Elsa, and let it go.

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Naw, I’m saying that if you don’t have incredible superpowers you’re usually best off doing your own thing instead of joining a super-team where everyone else does. He was doing a great job as an unhinged street vigilante fighting sword-wielding gangsters.

He just feels like the kind of character who needs his own quasi-grounded setting like Daredevil or Punisher instead of being put in a position where he’s supposed to fight a cosmic being who can bench-press a moon.

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So when Thor arrived on Earth in 2011, basically Clint should have just thrown in the towel right then & there, retired from SHIELD, and done something else “more suitable?”

O_o

I get what you’re saying, but it’s not like Hawkeye got to choose his own narrative. Blame that shit on the writers.

Also it must be said:

Being a regular-degular person living in the MCU (and not even a highly skilled assassin & marksman) would totally suck beyond all belief.

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That’s exactly what I’m doing. Like I said, he’s a formidable spy/assassin/vigilante. They just didn’t write his character in any storylines where those skill sets were especially important.

Even the way they introduced his character was anti-climatic. His big introduction was to… point an arrow at Thor but not actually shoot anything?

Hopefully the Black Widow movie will give him something more consequential to do if that ever actually makes it into production.

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I heard it’s already in the works?

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I feel the biggest mistake here is thinking President Biff is Thanos, when the true villain is Mitch McConnell, who is the one who has truly dismantled the government and is willing to let the country collapse in the name of keeping himself in power.

Really, President Biff is like Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin in Iron Man 3, the distraction whilst Mitch pursues his twisted agenda with remarkable callousness.

EDIT: that means in terms of this comic, it would only be delivering Thanos into a realm his allies already control. Fnord.

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You can tell that I am not a Marvel sort of guy when all I can think is “jeez, what a lame ripoff of Green Arrow!”

Last I heard it’s still in “pre-production” so they could still pull the plug at any time before filming starts. Seems like a lot of money to leave on the table if they didn’t go through with it though.

SNL was already mocking Marvel for dragging their feet on a Black Widow movie back in 2015.

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The issue with Clinton’s impeachment was that it basically came down to “he got a BJ in the oval office”. Yeah, there was actually more to it than that, but really that’s what all the sound bites of the time came down to, and pretty much all the public really remembers of it (now or then).

The public perception came down to it really being an issue between him and his wife, and a BJ not being bad enough to kick him out of office for. (Hell, a lot of guys on both sides of the aisle probably wanted to high-five him for cheating on his wife and having effectively no repercussions for it, legal or marital.)

Do the impeachment because it the right thing to do and it’s good for the republic.

It may not help the democrats will election in some parts of the country. Winning is elections is the best thing we can do right now. It’s more important to hold the house and take the senate. Mitch and Graham need to go down.

Fight on all fronts. Pull ever level of power.

The presidency needs to be redefined. One person with that much power can’t continue.

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That was a big problem in the comic books a lot of the time, more with Captain America than Hawkeye. They seemed fine to have Hawkeye fire a few arrows and stay in the background, but Cap had to be front and center and with his lack of powers it required some contortion to not have him get killed immediately all the time (the shield came in handy there). And Thor created a lot of plot problems too, requiring ever more-powerful foes, or a terse explanation of why Thor can’t be around at the moment (something that was done in a very lame fashion with another character in Endgame). But excluding all of the non-uniformly-powered characters would have made for a less-interesting group, so it became one of those things you don’t question about comics in order to hold the suspension of disbelief. One thing that annoys me about the movies is that they think they’re clever, for some reason, for delving into these areas (like, wow you guys destroyed a lot of stuff during that battle aren’t you ashamed? and, Why didn’t Wakanda save Africa?) and making them major plot lines. I wish I could tell the movie makers: trust me, we already thought about this when we were 10 years old and realized they lead to more trouble than they’re worth.

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