Okay, seriously “late” with this one, but I refuse to let my own incompetence mar the historical record, to wit: John Boehner was a shit.
Big John got a lot of praise last month with the release of his tell-a-lot reminiscence, On the House, the title reflecting his fondness for, you know, potent potables. The WashPost’s Kathy Kiely has a fairly decent take on Big John’s shtick, capturing some, but not all, of the ironies:
There’s an odd and poignant disconnect between the book’s tone and its unsettling subtext. The voice is warm, engaging, occasionally profane — that of a guy who just plopped down on a bar stool next to you, fortified with a glass of his beloved merlot and an unfiltered Camel (both of which feature prominently in Boehner’s portrait on the cover of the book), to tell you about a bunch of interesting people, most of whom he genuinely likes, and an amazing career that he’s still pinching himself to make sure he really had.
It’s as if Boehner himself hasn’t quite processed the transformation of the sunny “morning in America” Republicans he joined in the 1980s into the dark conspiracy theorists who dog-whistled a mob to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The problem is, Johnny had not a little to do with that transformation himself, as he unwittingly describes in “Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates, and the Birth of Republican Paraonia”, an essay drawn from his book and published in Politico, his tone of bewildered innocence thoroughly laughable, since he was one of the founders of that paranoia, present at the creation.
Boehner started as a “burn the House down” radical with Newt Gingrich in 1994, as he described back in 2017 in this long interview with Tim Alberta (also in Politico), exposing the moral “rot” in the Democratic Party, which was not so rotten, but coincided with the public’s longing for a “new beginning” of almost any sort after the end of the Cold War, when the Republicans lost their “mortal lock” on the presidency and Democrats lost theirs on Congress.
It’s fun not giving a shit, and Boehner, along with the rest of the Republican Party, didn’t give a shit as they set out to wreck the Clinton presidency. Straight-shootin’ John was in bed with the likes of Rush Limbaugh from the get-go, and it was Rush and all the other right-wing crazies that set the tone for the party from 1994 on. Rush was already such a big deal in the Republican Party by 1994 that he gave a special broadcast from the House Speaker’s office after Newt was sworn in in January, 1995, but Boehner wants to pretend that things didn’t get weird until Republicans took the House in 2010.
Over and over again, John pretends to be “appalled” by the irresponsibility of the “New Right, but, like every other “responsible” Republican, he never did a damn thing about it until after leaving office, when he was powerless. He was always the enabler, never the leader.
Boehner reached his nadir (probably) in 2015 when, as House Speaker, he unilaterally invited Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress to lobby against the nuclear agreement that the Obama administration was negotiating with Iran. This was utterly disgraceful behavior, showing complete contempt for the nation’s chief executive and entirely in keeping with the lack of scruple that he moans about over and over again. And calling Jim Jordan and few other leading Republican schmucks “assholes” doesn’t make up for it.
Afterwords
Back in 1951, Republican House Minority Leader Joe Martin, anxious to disrupt the Truman administration’s attempt to reach a peace settlement in Korea, wrote a letter to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was, of course, commanding U.S. forces there, asking his views on what U.S. strategy should be. MacArthur responded to this grossly inappropriate query with a far more grossly inappropriate response, which Martin then read aloud on the House floor, leading ultimately to MacArthur’s dismissal. These strike me as the high-water marks of congressional irresponsibility, but it’s quite possible that I’ve missed some.
