John Boehner reminds us Republicans lived in 'Crazytown' long before Trump

By DICK POLMAN

We Americans tend to forget our history, even when it’s recent. So put your hands together for John Boehner, the former Republican Speaker of the House, who reminds us in his new memoir that his party was fatally infested with “crazies” and “nuts” and “lunatics” – those are his words – long before the MAGA termites began gnawing at the woodwork.

It’s not exactly news that Boehner feels this way – he quit in 2015 because he was sick of all the “morons” (again, his word) – but an excerpt from his book, posted the other day, vividly refutes the lazy and widely mistaken belief that it was Trump who drove the party into a ditch. Truth is, the party was already there – stewing in racism, anger, and grievance – when Trump trudged onto the scene and turned the brush fires into a bonfire.

This scorching passage, from Boehner’s book, says it all:

“In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called ‘a shellacking.’ And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name – and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category … I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way … You could tell they weren’t paying attention because they were just thinking of how to fundraise off of outrage or how they could get on Hannity that night.”

That was 11 years ago – long before the advent of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other Trump demon spawn. Greene doesn’t care that she was recently kicked off a House committee, because she thinks that legislating is boring anyway, and she just wants to focus on her performative propaganda. That’s not new behavior. As Boehner writes about the tea party class of 2010, “They didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.”

Indeed, Boehner writes, their “Crazytown” was built on a solid foundation of hatred: “This new crowd hated – and I mean hated – Barack Obama.”

(Gee, I wonder why. And no wonder a failed casino operator got so much mileage from his birther lies.)

It’s nice indeed that Boehner is calling out the “crap” he had to deal with, but we should also remember that he too occasionally indulged in it. One of the racist dog whistles about Obama was that he was a secret Muslim. When Boehner appeared on Meet the Press in February 2011, he was specifically asked about that pejorative lie: “As the speaker of the House, do you not think it’s your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?”

Boehner’s answer: “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think …The American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t – it’s not my job to tell them.” Not exactly a profile in courage. Especially when we remember ( I do, anyway) that Boehner at that time was trying very hard to tell the American people what to think about Obamacare – that it was a job-killing train wreck catastrophe. But apparently he didn’t think it was his duty to enlighten the “morons” about the president’s Christian faith.

So Boehner’s hands are not totally clean when he writes that “by 2011, the right-wing propaganda nuts had managed to turn Obama into a toxic brand for conservatives…spreading dangerous nonsense like they did every day about Obama.”

Nevertheless, it’s possible to conjure a little sympathy for the beleaguered House speaker, who took a lot of heat from the nuts for his failure to march with them 100% of the time. Heck, he did try to hose down Fox News boss Roger Ailes – he says he pleaded with Ailes “to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air,” because their “bullshit” was making Boehner’s job so much harder. But alas, Ailes didn’t listen. Boehner writes: “I thought I could get him to control the crazies, and instead I found myself talking to the president of the club.”

And so he became increasingly disillusioned and isolated from his own party hacks. I kept flashing on some old Bob Dylan lyrics: “People are crazy and times are strange/ I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range / I used to care, but / Things have changed.”

By 2013, Boehner writes, “the chaos caucus…had a new head lunatic leading the way, who wasn’t even a House member. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz.” Boehner’s book will undoubtedly detail the “reckless asshole’s” most notorious stunt, shutting down the federal government for 16 days in a doomed bid to kill Obamacare.

As Charlie Dent, a now-retired Pennsylvania Republican congressman and former Boehner ally, noted this weekend, “Sadly, for Boehner, he never stood a chance … the Republican party was already struggling with its identity and ideology long before Trump was a serious candidate for political office.” In 2016 Trump was merely “the consequence,” having “turned fear into the highest form of political power.”

And it’s still working, as evidenced by current House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s eagerness to fly to Mar-a-Lago and lick the loser’s shoes. Whatever we may think of John Boehner, he at least was not so weak as to sink so low. Indeed, it speaks volumes about today’s insurrectionist-abetting GOP that in retrospect he looks faintly saintly.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2021

Populist.com