I am told that “Bulworth” is a largely forgotten, fifteen year-old movie about a senator who, having contracted his own assassination, begins to speak the brutal truths that are really on his mind.

One can, apparently, speak of “pulling a Bulworth” or “going Bulworth,” and the president, it seems, often dreams of doing exactly that. Mr. Obama harbors a “desire to be liberated from what he sees as the hindrances on him,” and particularly from those hindrances that compel him to hold his tongue. He would surely like to give everyone a good piece of his mind, but other considerations trump that wish to be “truthful” and”straightforward.” Direct, unfiltered speech can cut like a knife and pound like a hammer. A president cannot wallop and slice at will. No, he must be “practical.”

Perhaps “Bullworth” was a dreadful, rightly unremembered movie. I have not seen it; I cannot say. But bulworth is a delightful, beautifully expressive neologism. It is the antonym of the anodyne bullshit that supposedly greases the wheels of our country’s practical political machinery. “Bullshit works,” I have read, “Bulworth doesn’t. That is, however, the exquisite significance of the word. Bullshit is what keeps the process chugging along. Bulworth is how you break it. If bulworth does not work, it is because bulworth is not supposed to work. Bulworth is destructive by nature.

Dreams of bulworth do not indulge in the happy fantasy that politicians “could transform American politics with the power of honest words,” if only they “gave it to ‘em straight.” No, to dream of bulworth is to dream of sabotage by shear force of honesty. This destructive impulse is neither malicious nor nihilistic. It is destruction for the sake of catharsis, both personally and politically. Washing yourself of all artifice, abandoning all reserve, you would finally say to Hell with all of you, I will speak the truth. Its feculence purged, the apparatus of politics would shudder and halt and disintegrate. To Hell with all of that too.

Bulworth is the fantasy of the man who can no longer stand the stench of the grease that keeps the practical machinery of government in motion. And even more so it is the fantasy of the man who sees all too clearly that bullshit no longer suffices to grease that old political machine. The president, I suspect, is becoming the latter sort of man.

Revelations about an IRS scandal and resurgent Benghazi recriminations brought the question to the fore. How probable is it that House Republicans will commence impeachment proceedings against Barack Obama?

“Impeachment is crazy,” writes Michael Tomasky, “and the idea that Obama has any direct culpability in either of these matters is, given what we know today, utter madness.” But that is actually why Mr. Tomasky argues that impeachment is increasingly probable. The Republican Party does “their base’s bidding,” and that base, living in the “Pavlovian swamps of the nutso right,” already believes that the president “ is a socialist; that he’s bent on bringing the United States of America down, or at least that he definitely doesn’t love the country and the Constitution … the way they do; that he’s not a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office to start with.”

The Republicans in the House do not need to convince their voters that the president merits impeachment, because their voters already believe that. All they need is a pretext for setting impeachment proceedings in motion. So, yes, impeaching the president would be utter madness, but “utter madness is what today’s Republicans do.” Jamelle Bouie states Mr. Tomasky’s implicit conclusion:  “the question isn’t ‘will Republicans try to impeach Obama,’ it’s ‘when will it happen?’” Given enough time, the probability that crazy people will attempt something truly crazy approaches one. Given enough time, the president will be impeached.

Jonathan Bernstein argues the contrary case: the probability of impeachment is “a lot lower” than many seem to think. In his view, the Republican still retain a certain capacity for rational action, and impeaching the president would not qualify as a rational action. First, House Republicans, or at least their leadership “learned a lesson from the Bill Clinton impeachment,” namely that “spurious impeachment helps the president and hurts the other party.”

Second, the “incentives” do not appear to “run towards impeachment.” To be sure, “Scandal-mongering … is very lucrative within the conservative marketplace, and works well for Members of Congress who seek publicity,” but “actually moving towards impeachment” may do nothing for House Republicans, if only because “finishing an impeachment presumably ends whatever scandal they are mongering.” In short, Republicans have everything to gain from beating the drum for impeachment, but nothing actually to gain from effecting impeachment.

Though diametrically opposed, both assessments  attempt to do exactly the same thing: define the House Republicans as actors, and thereby render their actions predictable. One defines Republicans in the House as madmen who will do mad things. The other defines Republicans in the House as rational actors who will do rational things. It is prediction by taxonomy. But in the affairs of men the type of actor is often less consequential than the nature of human action itself.

There is an element of madness inherent in even the most rational of human actions. This is partly because we can never know the fully spun-out effects of our actions with real certainty, but it is mostly because we can never truly know in advance how others will react to our actions. Even the best models can only predict most of the action most of the time, and with any specific action there always remains something irreducibly unpredictable. This is not a flaw in the model. That irreducible unpredictability is the truly human element of all human action.

How probable is it that House Republicans will commence impeachment proceedings against Barack Obama? Mad or not, rational or not, the House Republicans have in the last few days opened themselves to a new enterprise, and that can only mean that the range of potential outcomes has both enlarged and become much less predictable.