“Scumbag John” — Speaker of the House Boehner as the Face of American Government

© 2011 Peter Free

 

14 February 2011

 

 

If one wanted to caricaturize Congress, it would be difficult to top House Majority Leader John Boehner as a model

 

He looks good, sounds authoritative, and has an oily fluidity that oozes him well between the levers of plutocratic power.

 

Reporter Matt Taibbi recently examined the new Speaker of the House in a vitriolic essay that skillfully incorporated facts and vignettes to support a handful of telling impressions:

 

John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich.

 

Recent polls show that only 13 percent of Americans approve of the job performance of their national legislature . . . . .

 

The underlying dynamic is bought-off congressmen ignoring real social problems and using the legislative process to construct massive perpetual handouts for their campaign-contributor sponsors.

 

Both parties have now made the servicing of the giant handout machine their primary raison d'être . . . .

 

[I]t's Boehner's skill at raising cash that gives him his power base in the House.

 

Boehner just represents a certain type of hollowly driven, two-faced personality unique to the Beltway. . . . he's the kind of guy who would step over his mother to score a political point.

 

The new speaker represents an increasingly endangered class of Beltway jobholders who know how to raise money and get elected, but not much beyond that. He now finds himself the party's last line of defense against millions of angry voters who, for the first time in recent memory, are at least attempting to watch what Congress is up to.

 

© 2011 Matt Taibbi, The Crying Shame of John Boehner, Rolling Stone (05 January 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

Mr. Taibbi’s essay is worth reading.  Boehner’s transgressions (of even loosely-defined rectitude) are so numerous that one can’t simply point to one.  Instead, his slime trail links one odiferous moral crassness after another.

 

“He can’t possibly be that bad — can he?”

 

Yes, he can.

 

Here, for example, is what Representative Boehner had to say on Meet the Press yesterday.  Host David Gregory asked him about the Speaker’s duty to correct widespread misinformation about President Obama’s alleged Muslim religious beliefs and foreign birthplace:

 

MR. GREGORY:  As the speaker of the House, as a leader, do you not think it's your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?

 

SPEAKER BOEHNER:  David, it's not my job to tell the American people what to think.  Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people.  Having said that, the state of Hawaii has said that he was born there.  That's good enough for me.  The president says he's a Christian.  I accept him at his word.

 

MR. GREGORY:  But isn't that a little bit fast and loose?  I mean, you are the leader in Congress and you're not standing up to obvious facts and saying, "These are facts.  If you don't believe that, it's nonsense."

 

SPEAKER BOEHNER:  I just outlined the facts as I understand them.  I believe that the president is a citizen.  I believe the president is a Christian. I'll take him at his word.  But, but...

 

MR. GREGORY:  But that kind of ignorance about whether he's a Muslim doesn't concern you?

 

SPEAKER BOEHNER:  Listen, the American people have the right to think what they want to think.  I can't--it's not my job to tell them.

 

MR. GREGORY:  Why isn't it your job to stand up and say, "No, the facts are these"?

 

SPEAKER BOEHNER:  I am...

 

MR. GREGORY:  Didn't John McCain do that...

 

SPEAKER BOEHNER:  I, I, I just did. . . . But remember something, it's not--it really is not our job to tell the American people what to believe and what to think.  There's a lot of information out there, people read a lot of things...

 

MR. GREGORY:  You shouldn't stand up to misinformation or stereotypes?

 

SPEAKER BOEHNER:  I've made clear what I believe the facts are.

 

MR. GREGORY:  But . . . is it because it weakens the president politically, it seeks to delegitimize him that you sort of want to let it stay out there?

 

SPEAKER BOEHNER:  No.  What I'm trying to do is to do my job.  Our job is to focus on spending.  We're spending too much money here in Washington.  The president's going to outline this new budget tomorrow, that I outlined earlier, spends too much, borrows too much, and taxes too much.  And the president wants to talk about winning the future.  This isn't winning the future, it's spending the future.

 

© David Gregory, Meet the Press transcript for Feb. 13, 2011, MSNBC.com (13 February 2011)

 

 

Look a bit deeper at Representative Boehner’s pretended logic

 

Speaker Boehner argued that, “David, it's not my job to tell the American people what to think.  Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people.”

 

So — Boehner wants us to believe that Congress should follow instructions from the public, no matter how ignorant, stupid, or self-destructive we are?

 

What is leadership for?

 

Speaker Boehner cannot really believe what he said.  He is just not smart enough to be cleverly opaque about wanting to see the President done in by Extreme Right’s deliberate fostering of blatant lies about his origins and his religion.

 

Therefore, Boehner had to change the subject that Mr. Gregory had raised from (a) the duty of responsible political leadership to (b) a pretend discussion about national spending — another one of Trough-Swilling Boehner’s well-traveled flights of effortless hypocrisy.

 

Conclusion — it’s all in the name

 

“Scumbag John” fits.