A Republican book I Might Just Have to Read

 

Since the majority of you can’t read the entire article (WaPo is a subscription service) I’m going to share several quotes from (former Speaker of the House) John Boehner’s soon to be released book. They are from a lengthy article/review. Bear in mind, Mr. Boehner is a Republican.

Here' s the headline:

“In new book, John Boehner says today’s GOP is unrecognizable to traditional conservatives" (italics, where added, are mine) and dishes on his time in politics.

Boehner writes that he was “Happy to be away from Washington on Jan. 20, 2017, when Trump was sworn in as president and completed his hostile takeover of the party” to which the Ohio Republican had dedicated decades of his life. “That was fine by me because I’m not sure I belonged to the Republican Party he created.”

“I don’t even think I could get elected in today’s Republican Party anyway. I don’t think Ronald Reagan could either”

“Trump incited that bloody insurrection (the attack on the capitol) for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the b------- he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November. He claimed voter fraud without any evidence,” Boehner writes. “The legislative terrorism that I’d witnessed as Speaker had now encouraged actual terrorism.”

There’s some bit of praise for almost everyone, mixed in with digs about their politics. Everyone except Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Boehner has nothing but harsh words over Cruz’s actions dating back to a 2013 federal government shutdown where the Texan played a starring role.

Boehner met the future president during a golf outing at Trump National in Westchester, N.Y., when he joined Boehner and two insurance executives for a round. He doesn’t say the date, but notes he was House minority leader then, so this encounter would have been between 2007 and 2011.

Before they set off, Trump asked a young Boehner staffer the names of the executives. It was only after 18 holes that the two men summoned the courage to tell Boehner and Trump that they’d been calling them the wrong names all day. Boehner laughed, but Trump turned angry. “This sort of glower fell across his face,” Boehner writes. Then Trump got in the staffer’s face and berated him. “What are you, some kind of idiot?” Trump shouted. “You want to know how to remember somebody’s name? You f-----g LISTEN!”

There “was something dark about” Trump’s reaction, Boehner observed. “I’d never seen anybody treat a staffer like that — not in politics, not ever, this was more than New York bluster. This was real anger, over something very, very small. We had no idea then what that anger would do to our country.”

And:  “I know what we all said at the time: Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath. In my view, Republicans impeached him for one reason and one reason only . . . Tom DeLay believed that impeaching Clinton would win us all these House seats, would be a big win politically, and he convinced enough of the membership and the GOP base that this was true.” “Clinton probably did commit perjury. That’s not a good thing. But lying about an affair to save yourself from embarrassment isn’t the same as lying about an issue of national security,”

 

Before he was Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows was a thorn in Boehner’s side while serving as a Republican congressman from North Carolina. As founder of the Freedom Caucus, a group of far-right Republicans, Meadows was often in Boehner’s way. Boehner had campaigned for Meadows in his first election, but in one of Meadows’s first actions as a freshman congressman, he voted against Boehner for speaker — “a vote that like many of the Freedom Caucus’s efforts ended in abject failure,” Boehner writes.

Soon after, Meadows asked for a private meeting. Within a few minutes in Boehner’s office, the congressman “dropped off the couch and was on his knees. Right there on my rug. That was a first. His hands came together in front of him as if he were about to pray,” Boehner recalls. He asked Boehner to forgive him.

“I was so startled I can’t remember exactly what the hell he was saying. For a moment, I wondered what his elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears, but that wasn’t my problem,” Boehner writes. So Boehner took a “long, slow draw” of his cigarette and left Meadows there on his knees waiting. Then, after an extended silence, Boehner looked down at him asked, “For what?”

Boehner reflects that even after becoming speaker, he saw where the party was going. He calls 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin “one of the chief crazies” in the party but says he understood Sen. John McCain’s motivation in picking her as his running mate to fire up the base. Boehner says he was already living in “Crazytown,” and “when I took the Speaker’s gavel in 2011, two years into the Obama presidency, I became its mayor. Crazytown was populated by jackasses, and media hounds, and some normal citizens as baffled as I was about how we got trapped inside the city walls. Every second of every day since Barack Obama became president I was fighting one bats — t idea after another.” Boehner’s disregard for these elements has been well-established — and particularly his disdain for the man he describes as the ringleader of the tea party movement. In a Politico op-ed adapted from the book last week, Boehner describes how birtherism and other maladies infected his party, and in audio leaked from his audiobook recording sessions he directs vulgar insults at Cruz.

Boehner urged people who want to actually fix Washington to “send people there to represent you who actually want to get things done instead of hucksters making pie-in-the-sky promises or legislative terrorists just looking to go to Washington and blow everything up.” Which eliminates a significant number of junior Republican Congressmen(and ONE woman especially!) and Senators. I think I might have to read ol’ John’s book!

 

Material re: the Book taken from The Washington Post, 9 March, 2021