Today's GOP: Grifters, Kooks, and Shovelers of Manure

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

This week Juan Williams, a news analyst at Fox, made the sad observation that the GOP "is now the party of grifters and kooks."  He was speaking in the present tense and no doubt referencing the recent politicians profiting off of their own properties, credit card scams, the misuse of campaign funds, attention-seekers who like to parade around in public carrying automatic weapons, conspiracy theorists, and perhaps even the ego-obsessed politicians who have trouble controlling their raging libidos.

That type of statement is especially damning in that it comes from an employee of Fox News, until recently considered by many to be the official voice of the Republican Party.

And now a former GOP VIP has stepped into the breach and is also lobbing political grenades at his own party.  John Boehner is sloshing down a glass or three of merlot, giving interviews, and telling it like it is - or at least like he remembers it to have been.

I haven't read much in the way of political tell-alls lately, but I may just have to break down and buy a copy of Boehner's new book:  "On the House:  A Washington Memoir."  

John Boehner, a former Republican congressman who was Speaker of the House from 2011-2015, during half of Barack Obama's tenure as President, has been grabbing a lot of press attention over the past few days while promoting his book.    The insider's look at Washington, DC, isn't making news for what the former Speaker says about Democrats like Obama or Nancy Pelosi, although he was not an outspoken fan of either, but it is making waves for the way he characterizes some of his fellow Republicans.

In discussing the man who served in the White House between the Obama and Biden administrations, for instance, Boehner recalls a golf outing with that individual prior to his presidency in which the man coldly and savagely berated an underling in front of several prominent individuals, an encounter that was so brutal that Boehner remembered it clearly several years later.  And then, in discussing the assault on the Capitol on January 6th of this year, he said that same individual, as President, had "incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetrated by the bullshit he's been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November."

That may not be Robert Frost, but it ain't bad.

Reviewers have noted that while Boehner lampoons several prominent Republicans in his book, often with locker room language, he usually balances those attacks out with the inclusion of some positive stories about the same people - with one notable exception.  Apparently he could find nothing charitable to say about Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a man whom the former House Speaker characterizes in his book as "a reckless asshole who thinks he's smarter than everyone else."

Interestingly, John Boehner is also critical of his fellow Ohio Republican congressman, Rep. Jim Jordan, citing him as a man who is always tearing things down but never building anything.  Jordan, who is in his eighth term in Congress, is often talked about as a noisemaker who has never actually written a bill that has gone on to become law.

John Boehner apparently has a lot to say.  It's a shame that he didn't say it earlier.