John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives from 2009 to 2015, engaged in one of the prerogatives of those who have relinquished power—speaking the truth. Among other things, Boehner claimed that all that Republican talk about repealing and replacing ObamaCare is just talk:
“They’ll fix Obamacare, and I shouldn’t have called it repeal and replace because that’s not what’s going to happen. They’re basically going to fix the flaws and put a more conservative box around it.”
In fact, that straight talk was only a taste of what Boehner had to dish, because the tan man went on to add the following:
“In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once. And all this happy talk that went on in November and December and January about repeal, repeal, repeal—yeah, we’ll do replace, replace—I started laughing, because if you pass repeal without replace, first, anything that happens is your fault. You broke it.”
So, the Republican Party is full of shit! Interesting to know!
But, wait, there’s more. Boehner also voiced a complaint similar to mine regarding the 2016 election, that the Democrats nominated the only candidate capable of losing to Donald Trump, while the Republicans nominated the only candidate capable of losing to Hillary Clinton. But there a bit more of an edge to John’s version. I seemed to hear Boehner telling the Democrats “If you idiots had only nominated a candidate whose name was not Hillary Fucking Clinton I could have endorsed him—or her—and so could a lot of other good Republicans, and we wouldn’t be stuck with that non-stop freak show in the White House pissing all over our party, country, and constitution for the next four years.”
I agree with John that it’s a serious mark against my party that we couldn’t come with a candidate whose name wasn’t Hillary Fucking Clinton—and by that I don’t mean Bernie Sanders. Bernie, lest we forget, was not1 a Democrat and had no real business running in our primaries in the first place. The fact that a fact-challenged chump/total economic moron like Sanders could do so much damage in our primaries is another strike against the party.
But let me get back to John, because I don’t intend to let him off the hook. Yes, Hillary was a painfully uninspired choice. Yes, she is a brain-dead centralizing, run every aspect of your life for you because I know what’s good for you and you don’t liberal who can’t see past her own preconceptions to save her life, one who also thinks it’s a good idea to send Americans to die in Syria, but—but!—with all her obvious and striking limitations, Hillary Clinton is not a monster. With good luck—more than she would deserve—she could have proved to be a reasonably competent president. It is you Republicans, John Boehner, you Republicans who have decided that every Democrat running for president—and, even worse, winning the presidency—is a monster. You lied yourselves into believing that first Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama were monsters, which allowed you to justify to yourselves unprecedented campaigns to wreck and destroy these men, and the country along with it, driven by a desperate fear that your precious party could no longer win elections fairly and thus must win them unfairly. You acquiesced in all of this, over and over again, for the “good” of the party, and the good of your career, and the hope, which was, of course, always denied you, of using your power to do something good for the country, once you had ultimately crushed and castrated the president. Your party has been the party of destruction since 1992, and now, after more than twenty years of railing about monsters, you have created one, and he sits in the White House. And that is your doing, John Boehner, not Hillary Clinton’s.
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So many italics! I must be pissed! ↩︎
