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John Boehner Shellacked Ted Cruz in His Book. But What's This About Michele Bachmann?

The former Speaker is refreshingly honest about the Republican Party's descent into madness, but he fails to wrap his arms around the whole problem or how long it's been there.



_By Jack Holmes
Apr 2, 2021

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a36012677/john-boehner-book-ted-cruz/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_esq&utm_medium=email&date=040221&utm_campaign=nl23407222

Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House more than a decade before John Boehner was. That's something to keep in mind as the more recent ex-honcho, now a tobacco and marijuana lobbyist, rolls out his new book, On the House, about his time in Congress and beyond.

A new excerpt published in Politico on Friday is remarkably clear-eyed at points about the extent to which the Republican Party has descended into virulent insanity. It also has some snappy one-liners, like Boehner's assessment of Ted Cruz: "There is nothing more dangerous," Boehner writes, "than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else."

But this excerpt, at least, falls short of a truly comprehensive accounting of the party's trip into the abyss. Take this bit about the 2010 class of freshmen Republican members of Congress, whom Boehner rightly sized up as a few bulbs short of a chandelier.

Some of them, well, 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. Ronald Reagan used to say something to the effect that if I get 80 or 90 percent of what I want, that’s a win. These guys wanted 100 percent every time. In fact, I don’t think that would satisfy them, because they didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.

This is certainly true, and it's only gotten worse, to the point that Marjorie Taylor Greene has been disavowed by CrossFit for being too...out there.

We live now in the era of Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert, and all the rest. But what is it about "wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades" that does not describe Gingrich's time as Speaker, leading the Republican caucus on a merry march into unreason while honing many of the scorched-earth tactics that have now become go-tos for the party of performative conflict and government-by-chaos?

There's also some requisite Ronald Reagan worship, as if Reagan did not, in his day, paint Medicare as the harbinger of socialist tyranny and rail against trees as dastardly polluters while extolling the virtues of the internal combustion engine. These folks have been crazy for a long time, and we need people like Boehner to wrap their arms around all of it.



This ain’t new.

Instead, the snappy—and mostly accurate—punchlines continue alongside some revisionism. We learn, for one thing, that Roger Ailes was normal until Barack Obama drove him insane. While Boehner makes a convincing case Ailes had started getting high on his own supply by early on in the 2010s, he was a complete sicko well before that.

Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh were outside "Looneyville" until around the same time, Boehner tells us, when they started dabbling in the Birther stuff. What?

And Boehner also whitewashes his own role in the Birther fiasco, playing up his 2011 interview with Brian Williams of NBC in which he flatly stated, "The state of Hawaii has said that President Obama was born there. That’s good enough for me." But he also said, "It's not my job to tell the American people what to think," and in retrospect, that was the attitude that ruled the day.

Boehner allowed the crazy caucus to flourish because, as he admirably admits in the excerpt, he had simply lost control to the people willing to say anything to get on Hannity.

Speaking of, there are some wildly varied assessments of Michele Bachmann. Boehner starts out seeing the former Minnesota congresswoman as "a lunatic," but by the end he has found respect and admiration for her work on the House Intelligence Committee.

(She got the gig by threatening to trash him on Fox News for refusing to give her a spot on the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Intelligence was a compromise, in more ways than one.)

But then Boehner claims Bachmann earned the respect of her colleagues on the committee and brought focus and graft to her work. He quotes one of his own "Boehnerisms" to chalk it all up as, "Get the right people on the bus, and help them find the right seat." This is in reference to the same Michele Bachmann who spent at least some of her time on the committee banging on about how Hillary Clinton's longtime aide, Huma Abedin, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is the right seat on the bus? And you wondered where Trump came from. The right-wing Republicans who could tie their own shoes, like John Boehner, played footsie with the right-wing Republicans who had long since departed observable reality, like Bachmann, who worked in tandem with right-wing infotainment vortex until the whole conservative movement was drowning in paranoid conspiracies about dark hordes of Others coming to destroy The America You Know and Love.

And the mainstream media ushered this all along. Even now, the Politico packaging on the Boehner excerpt describes the GOP as being a "center-right party" before the 2010 midterms fiasco, and Boehner as "the man who tried to keep it sane." How hard did he try, really, when the bus looks like this and has long since gone over the cliff?