REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

 JOHN BOEHNER WRITES A “TRUTHFUL WASHINGTON TELL-ALL BOOK”

 

…Texas Senator, Ted Cruz…..someone that the former House Speaker only has harsh comments

 

John Boehner tells it “like he sees it in D.C.”

 

This will be a long article because it will be a review of the new book by the former House Speaker, John Boehner. 

Even though he was a devout Republican, he has a lot of criticism of what has become of the GOP, specifically under the former President Trump.

Boehner was a very traditional conservative, and he makes it clear with his writing, using his own foul language in the book, that he uses in real life.

The name of the book is “On The House: A Washington Memoir” and it per the reviews: “a rollicking-foul-mouthed recounting of Boehner’s 25 years on Capitol Hill”.

To start the book, Boehner says he was happy to be away from Washington when Trump was sworn in as president. Also, after Trump completed his disgusting, hostile takeover of the party to which the Ohio Republican had previously dedicated decades of his life. “That was fine by me because I’m not sure I belonged to the Republican Party he [Trump] created.”

The book was finished well before the January 6^th attack on the Capitol, and Boehner re-wrote portions of the book to forcefully blame Trump for what he called “a low point for our country”.  A point that left him on the verge of tears.  “Trump incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election.  Boehner also wrote: He claimed voter fraud without any evidence.”

Boehner’s book is a classic Washington “tell-all,” book, and one with his typical humorous style. Even his image on the book cover is of him smiling, wearing a suit, holding a glass half-full of red wine and with a lit Camel cigarette in an ashtray.  It totally shows his old-school approach to politics.

He also wrote that “I don’t even think I could get elected in today’s Republican Party.  I don’t think Ronald Reagan could either.”  Although he never held office during the Trump years, Boehner’s book sets the stage for how the Republican Party ended up with the former real estate developer turned reality TV star as its standard-bearer.

Boehner has a lot of praise for those he worked with, but he also goes after them about their politics.  That is, praise for everyone but the Texas Republican Senator, Ted Cruz.  Boehner has nothing but harsh words over Cruz’s actions, going back to the 2013 federal government shutdown, where the Texan played such a starring role.

As to what Boehner does today for his own personal income, Boehner serves on several corporate boards and is a senior adviser at the law firm: Squire Patton Boggs.  Today, Boehner goes out of his way to defend and support several of the institutions in Washington such as: the bureaucrats Trump called “the deep state; and the lobbyists that Trump dubbed “the swamp”; and the press corps that Trump labeled the “enemy of the people,” which is all B.S..

Boehner writes: “Get comfortable. Pour yourself a glass of something nice. You’re going to enjoy this.” This concludes his book’s introduction. 

What follows are some of the most notable parts of his memoir:

“Pelosi had gutted Big John Dingell like a halibut she found floating around San Francisco Bay, then calmly sat back and had a cup of coffee afterward. His entrails were left on display for everyone in the House of Representatives to see, and to remember,” Boehner writes. “I don’t think Nancy relished mounting Dingell on her wall… she certainly didn’t brag about it… but that’s not the point. The point is she did it, and I have no doubt that she slept just fine that night.”

Boehner later describes how Pelosi kept an “iron grip” on her members, not tolerating any “dissension in her ranks.”

“Even if I wanted to, I could never operate like Pelosi did,” he writes. “The fact was, I didn’t want to act that way, even though sometimes other people thought I should.”

Boehner also regrets his support for impeaching President Bill Clinton in 1998 because: “the House Republicans’ motives were purely political”, he writes.

“I know what we all said at the time: Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath. In my view, Republicans impeached him for one reason and one reason only . . . Tom DeLay believed that impeaching Clinton would win us all these House seats, it would be a big win politically, and he convinced enough of the membership and the GOP base that this was true.”

Boehner acknowledges that he supported the move at the time, but in retrospect doesn’t think Clinton’s behavior rose to impeachment charges.

“Clinton probably did commit perjury. That’s not a good thing. But lying about an affair to save yourself from embarrassment isn’t the same as lying about an issue of national security,” Boehner writes.

The House Republicans’ plans backfired and they lost five seats in the midterms that year.

Boehner was effectively cast out as House speaker thanks to a revolt among the more extreme elements of his conference. And his memoir is unsparing when it comes to his contempt for those members.

Boehner says that even after becoming speaker, he saw where the party was going. He calls 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin “one of the chief crazies” in the party, but says he understood Sen. John McCain’s motivation in picking her as his running mate to fire up the base.

Boehner says he was already living in “Crazytown,” and “when I took the Speaker’s gavel in 2011, two years into the Obama presidency, I became its mayor. Crazytown was populated by jackasses, and media hounds, and some normal citizens as baffled as I was about how we got trapped inside the city walls. Every second of every day since Barack Obama became president I was fighting one batshit idea after another.”

Boehner’s disregard for these elements has been well-established, and particularly his disdain for the man he describes as the ringleader of the tea party movement. In a Politico op-ed adapted from the book, Boehner describes how birtherism and other maladies infected his party, and in an audio leaked from his audiobook recording sessions he directs vulgar insults at Cruz.

Boehner urged people who want to actually fix Washington to “send people there to represent you who actually want to get things done instead of hucksters making pie-in-the-sky promises or legislative terrorists just looking to go to Washington and blow everything up.”

Palin isn’t the only member of the 2008 GOP presidential ticket who Boehner criticizes.

To be clear, he professes admiration for McCain (R-AZ). But he also casts him as being out of his element when it came to his late move in the 2008 presidential race.  The move was to suspend his campaign and insert himself into a bank bailout bill, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), during the financial crisis.

“Then almost out of nowhere, Senator John McCain decided to pop in. This was the last thing anyone needed, including, as it turned out, John himself,” Boehner writes, adding that McCain should have stayed on the campaign trail.

He says McCain showed up without any actual ideas. He said he, Boehner, asked the GOP presidential nominee what his plan was, only to have McCain turn the question on him. When he asked McCain what he planned to say in a key meeting, he says McCain asked him what he should say….?

“If I’d had a cigarette in my mouth, I might have swallowed it,” Boehner said, adding: “Now it was clear: there wasn’t anybody (a Republican) who was going to get us out of this mess.”

The former speaker also blasts President Trump’s accusations that bureaucrats were within agencies, such as the Justice Department and CIA, and were part of a “massive conspiracy against America.”

“There is something very destructive, not to mention delusional, about the notion that there is some plot deep within the nation’s capital, in the FBI, in the federal courts, in the intelligence community.  All this, just to undermine democratically elected officials,” he writes.

Boehner defends lobbyists as “educators” who have expertise on many issues, even if the nature of their work seems to make them political villains.

“If you listen to the lobbyists, you’re going to know exactly what that language you are voting on actually does, and how it affects real people,” writes Boehner, who today works with lobbyists, but he has never registered as one.

Two of Boehner’s trademarks during his time in Washington were his smoking habit and his love of a good glass of red wine. In his memoir, he tells the tale of both.

When Boehner was 19 years old he weighed 273 pounds and was teetering close to a size 40 pants. Determined to lose the weight, he came up with a diet plan: Three meals a day and a cigarette in between whenever he felt hungry.

Everyone smoked then, even pregnant women, he writes, “so give me a little bit of a break, please.”

He lost 85 pounds, trading bad eating habits for the lifelong bad habit of smoking.

And the wine?

Boehner explains it wasn’t always his beverage of choice, particularly growing up in the family’s “shot-and-beer tavern & cafe” outside Cincinnati.  Andy’s Cafe, was named after his grandfather.

“Once you start to get a little older, beer just fills you up too much with all that carbonation. Too much bloat. So then, as a ‘young professional,’ I switched to old fashioneds,” he writes, explaining how sugar and bitters softened the bourbon. “But if you’ve got a long night ahead of you, you usually find that drinking liquor for several hours is pretty much unsustainable. Plus, nothing that sweet can be good for you in the long run. And so I settled on wine. Drinking wine is a marathon, not a sprint, and makes sense for the more mature drinker.”

Although Merlot has been a Boehner staple, he is also a fan of Cabernet Sauvignon and, when he eats at his favorite Capitol Hill Italian restaurant, Trattoria Alberto, he drinks a chianti, while he downs “Veal alla Boehner.”

What’s that you ask? “It’s a lightly breaded thin piece of veal with two fried eggs and anchovies on top….delicious. Apparently it went off the official menu after I left town, but if you ask nicely I’m sure they’ll make it for you. Trust me, it’s worth it.”

“Veal, fried eggs and anchovies?  I guess I don’t have that old, middle-America ‘shot-and-beer tavern’ taste for that kind of food.”

With all of the areas that I never cared for Boehner’s style as the House Speaker, at least he didn’t blatantly lie to the American public like the GOP does today.

Boehner’s new book appears to be a serious glance at a former politician that tells the truth about himself and his time in Washington.  A breath of fresh air when compared to the “swampy GOP” today.

Copyright G. Ater 2021