Crying Shame

(Below are a few excerpts from Matt Taibbi's article "The Crying Shame of John Boehner" in the 1/20/11 issue of Rolling Stone. If you've never read Taibbi, you should. He's one of the best and funniest political writers working today. If you want to read the full article -- it's worth it -- just click on the article shown under Buster's Links.)

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THE CRYING SHAME OF JOHN BOEHNER. The new speaker is a lazy, double-talking shill for corporate interests. So how's he going to fare with the TEA Party? by Matt Taibbi

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

He's a five-tool insider who can lie, cheat, steal, play golf, change his mind on command and do anything else his lobbyist buddies and campaign contributors require of him.

It's hard to imagine a more unlikely marriage than John Boehner and the pitchfork-wielding, incumbent-eating TEA party, whose blood ostensibly boils at the thought of business as usual. Because John Boehner is business as usual, a man devoted almost exclusively to his own political survival by tending faithfully to the corrupt and clanking Beltway machinery.

In the Nineties, Boehner started weekly meetings with a group of lobbyists that helped him develop close ties to [big-time corporate interests]. And what does Boehner do with lobbyists? Well, one thing we know he does is play golf -- shitloads and shitloads of golf. [Boehner] reportedly copped to playing 100 rounds a year, while collecting a six-figure salary paid for by U.S. taxpayers. His political action committee spent almost $83,000 on golf events in 2009, and over the past eighteen months he has run up a $67,000 tab at the Ritz-Carlton golf resort in Naples, Florida.

Boehner is an innovator in the loathsome new political phenomenon of men crying in public, co-owning mastery of the habit with screeching media dillweed Glenn Beck.

Boehner has been a Bush Republican, i.e. a corporate schmoozer and remorseless spender of taxpayer money for whom the notion of small government is just something to say when the cameras are on, or when the public money in question might go to poor people, or immigrants, or other such unlikely golfers.

[Once upon a time] Congress was an easy job for any man with a nice fairway stroke, a limited moral compass, and a keen sense of bureaucratic loyalty. Things are different now. 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. The tee times are over.