On Sunday, in the latest round of leftist media adoration for deposed Republican figures they hated about five minutes ago, Politico ran a fawning profile of one-time Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH). Boehner wasn’t a particularly successful speaker — he led the House Republicans from 2007 to 2015, as both Minority Leader and Speaker. Boehner was deposed because he was widely perceived as caving to President Obama’s funding priorities; he seemed cold on the prospect of defunding particular aspects of the government if it meant going up against Obama directly.
Boehner’s record wasn’t particularly strong. In 2008, Boehner pushed through President Bush’s bank bailout. In 2010, Boehner posed as a hard-core conservative opposed to President Obama’s agenda tooth and nail. That didn’t last long. In 2011, he undercut House Republicans on their debt ceiling push for serious spending reform; shortly afterward, Boehner cut a deal with Democrats on the Budget Control Act, also known as “sequestration.” That deal slashed $1.2 trillion from the budget from 2013 to 2021 — but instead of holding President Obama’s feet to the fire, Boehner simply rammed through a bill that would take half of those cuts from defense if no actual material cuts were agreed to. Those cuts didn’t materialize, and Obama slashed defense. In 2011, Boehner also jacked up unfunded spending on disaster relief; the next year, he tried to purge conservatives from leadership positions in the House; in 2013, he ran away from Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) short-lived government shutdown, and later called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh”; he signed off on a $1 trillion deal later that year that raised spending $63 billion without offsetting cuts; in 2014, he did little to defund Obama’s executive amnesty, instead pushing through a cromnibus bill that avoided the issue; that came shortly after he tried to ram through an immigration reform bill that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
When conservatives kicked against Boehner’s leadership, he railed against them in a way he never railed against the Left. And so now, despite the fact that Boehner spoke warmly of President Trump during the primaries, the media are turning to him as some sort of voice of reason inside the Republican Party.
Why? Because he’s happy to tear them a new one from outside.
Boehner’s interview with Politico begins with him calling Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) “a**holes,” and stating, “F*** Jordan. F*** Chaffetz.” Jordan particularly earns Boehner’s ire: “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate…A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.”
Yes, it’s a wonder that Republicans in the House didn’t like Boehner.
It doesn’t stop there.
While Boehner points to cursing out former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in 2013, the two of them are going to co-chair a think tank at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He craps all over his former colleague and friend, Eric Cantor, who was ousted in a shock election in 2014: “That was the worst campaign ever run…I never saw anything like it.” On Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC): “He’s an idiot. I can’t tell you what makes him tick.” On the Republican Party leadership: “There is nobody.”
Boehner defends Obama’s tenure, too:
People thought in ’09, ’10, ’11, that the country couldn’t be divided more. And you go back to Obama’s campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion… It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide…I always liked Rush [Limbaugh]. When I went to Palm Beach I would always meet with Rush and we’d go play golf. But you know, who was that right-wing guy, [Mark] Levin? He went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys—I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me… I wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot.
No wonder the media suddenly love John Boehner, the man they used to despise (both Joe Biden and Obama praised Boehner). He’s giving them precisely what they want. And in doing so, he’s showing just why so many members of the Republican base disowned both him and the establishment they believed he represented.
(First reported by The Daily Wire) http://www.dailywire.com/news/22903/boehner-unleashes-mark-levin-house-conservatives-ben-shapiro (October 30, 2017)
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