Stop pitying Boehner!: He’s not just some well-meaning victim

Look at his career and record: The Speaker has long played with fire by playing to the worst of the Republican base

BY MUGAMBI JOUET

How much blame does John Boehner deserve for the shutdown of the federal government? A common narrative in recent months has been that he is a weak Speaker who has failed to rein in hard-line Republican House members, especially in the Tea Party’s ranks. Radical Congressmen make uncompromising ideological demands, the narrative goes, thereby forcing Boehner to take inflexible stances he does not really believe in, including the government shutdown. What most commentators tend to overlook is that Boehner himself has helped foment the radicalism of the modern Republican Party.

For years, he has made fiery declarations promoting the visceral animosity of numerous Republicans to the Obama administration. “Your government is disrespecting you, your family, your job, your children,” Boehner illustratively said in a 2010 speech, a year before he became Speaker of the House. “Your government is out of control. Do you have to accept it? Do you have to take it?” Boehner answered his own question: “Hell no, you don’t!”

Before the passage of the Obama administration’s health care reform in 2010, Boehner likened the law to “Armageddon,” the Biblical apocalypse, and said it was a “monstrosity” that would “ruin” America. Interviewed on 60 Minutes, he was literally moved to tears when explaining his desire that children continue to “have a shot at the American Dream” despite the menace posed by Obama’s policies (see the 6 min. mark of this video). Still in 2010, the year the GOP took back the House, Boehner warned that “we will not compromise on our principles.” He even explicitly noted that he rejects the word “compromise.”

Some commentators argue that Boehner has just been pandering to the Tea Party, yet this point overlooks how he already took hard-line stances well before the Tea Party movement came into existence. Back in the 1990s, he led a drive to abolish the Department of Education and helped Newt Gingrich craft the “Contract With America.”

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http://www.salon.com/2013/10/07/stop_pitying_boehner_he%E2%80%99s_not_just_some_well_meaning_victim/