Fun fact via Scott Whitlock: Michael Eric Dyson once signed a petition calling for George Bush to be “driven from office.” Even so, it’s hard to believe that anyone, even a guy who called Eric Holder “the Moses of our time,” could mean this semi-seriously. By “treasonous accusations,” does he mean that Palin herself accused Obama of treason in her Breitbart op-ed? Because she didn’t; she accused him of dereliction of duty. Or does he mean that merely floating the idea of impeachment, whether or not it’s justified by Obama’s infringement on separation of powers, is tantamount to treason? Treason involves an act of disloyalty to the United States, of course, not to the man in charge of the executive branch. Interesting that Dyson would conflate those two. I wonder which other Article I powers granted to Congress qualify as treasonous these days.

The most pitiful thing about this, actually, is how gratuitous it is even by MSNBC standards. He’s deep in the tank here defending Obama’s handling of the border crisis, but even his colleagues like Alex Wagner and Andrea Mitchell have been scratching their heads about that. And the impeachment thing, while fun to write about it, isn’t being taken seriously by anyone with real power — not the Speaker of the House, not Palin’s former running mate, not even her tea-party ally Ted Cruz. Dyson’s pulling the pin on a grenade at a moment when the left and right are momentarily a bit more aligned on the issues du jour than usual. But maybe we shouldn’t read much into it. I’ve always thought that Martin Bashir went wildly over the top with his rhetoric, especially vis-a-vis Palin, not so much because his disdain was really that deep but because he assumed that you can’t go wrong being excessively nasty to the right on MSNBC. I get the same vibe from Dyson here. You would think, if he’s throwing the word “treasonous” around, that he’d be exercised about it and want to explore that idea at length, but instead he zooms right past it, casual as can be. Just tossing it out there, a mindless little bouquet to the progressive viewer. Know your audience, I guess.