House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has announced a presidential Impeachment process, as the “next logical step,” based on “serious and credible allegations” of Biden’s “culture of corruption.”

Those are lies. No evidence supports such allegations. In fact they’ve been disproven.

After eight months of “investigating,” finding zilch, Republicans still talk like it’s “the biggest political corruption and criminal scandal in our nation’s history” (a quote from Rep. Elise Stefanik). But they have worked themselves up into a froth of Biden hatred; his real crime is having beaten their guy. Who was twice impeached, so this is payback.

They are also trying to muddy the waters. Next year will be saturated with news coverage of Trump trials, full of damning evidence of all his misdeeds. Republicans, insulting reality, want to make it seem as though Biden is equally criminal.

And McCarthy’s impeachment announcement was also dishonest because he isn’t serious about it. He’s skipped the customary House vote to authorize the process because it would fail. McCarthy’s announcement was just a sop to the crazy caucus — Gaetz, Good, Gosar, Greene, et al — or, more accurately, the extreme crazy caucus (the rest of the party being moderates in craziness). The extreme fringe has McCarthy by the balls. They want a government shutdown, aiming for deeper spending cuts than previously agreed to, and McCarthy is trying to buy them off with the impeachment posturing. It’s all empty posturing. (Though the budget crap actually harms the country.)

Meantime, none of those Republican champions of presidential probity, clamoring for Biden’s impeachment, voted to impeach Trump for holding up military aid to Ukraine, trying to extort a bribe from its president in the form of smearing a political opponent. None voted to impeach Trump for literally trying to overthrow the republic and prevent his elected successor from taking office. Nope, nothing to see there folks, no impeachable offenses. Ignore all Trump’s other obvious corruption too. But that scalawag Biden, on the other hand . . . .

And these Republicans have been bleating there’s a double standard, two-tiered justice in this country. That it’s somehow a “weaponized” partisan political “witch hunt” to try to hold Trump accountable for what are, Ms. Stefanik, indisputably the gravest of crimes ever committed by a U.S. president. Crimes that would shock all our pants off — if we still had any on. And this is the “law and order” party!

Interestingly, Putin the other day said the Trump indictments show America’s political system is corrupt, parroting the Republican line that the prosecutions are just politically motivated witch hunts, by Democrats trying to thwart a political adversary.

Pretty rich coming from a guy who literally murders political adversaries.

Republicans also prattle about the Constitution. It established impeachment as an extreme remedy, for extreme circumstances. Accordingly, we went for over two centuries with but a single presidential impeachment. Republicans show their constitutional principles by making a squalid, petty mockery of its impeachment provisions. As if talking impeachment is now just normal routine political theater.

People say all politicians lie. Actually, throughout my half century as an active Republican, I saw things differently from Democrats, but never deemed them liars. Still don’t. Politics used to be conducted with basic honesty — and harsh consequences for breaches. No longer. Responsible news media, reporting on McCarthy’s announcement, pointed out its untruth, but nobody cares.

No Republicans, that is. Likewise regarding all Trump’s lies, especially the “stolen election” lie. Republicans have become The Party of Lies because there is no downside. They’re destroying what used to be America’s civic culture of fundamental decency.

This Biden impeachment nonsense itself is the real crime. It’s all those Republican perpetrators who deserve removal from office.