Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia

[GMDino]

By JOHN BOEHNER!


Interesting read from someone who was inside the room at the time.


Really shows how what we once considered "radical" or right/left moves...and quickly.


https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/02/john-boehner-book-memoir-excerpt-478506

Quote:In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called “a shellacking.” And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name—and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category.

Retaking control of the House of Representatives put me in line to be the next Speaker of the House over the largest freshman Republican class in history: 87 newly elected members of the GOP. Since I was presiding over a large group of people who’d never sat in Congress, I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way. Incrementalism? Compromise? That wasn’t their thing. A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. That’s why they thought they were elected.

Some of them, well, you could tell they weren’t paying attention because they were just thinking of how to fundraise off of outrage or how they could get on Hannity that night. Ronald Reagan used to say something to the effect that if I get 80 or 90 percent of what I want, that’s a win. These guys wanted 100 percent every time. In fact, I don’t think that would satisfy them, because they didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.

Quote:A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. That’s why they thought they were elected.

To them, my talk of trying to get anything done made me a sellout, a dupe of the Democrats, and a traitor. Some of them had me in their sights from day one. They saw me as much of an “enemy” as the guy in the White House. Me, a guy who had come to the top of the leadership by exposing corruption and pushing conservative ideas. Now I was a “liberal collaborator.” So that took some getting used to. What I also had not anticipated was the extent to which this new crowd hated—and I mean hated—Barack Obama.



On election night 2010, after Republicans made massive gains, President Barack Obama makes a phone call to Congressman John Boehner, the presumptive incoming speaker of the House. | The White House/Pete Souza/AP

By 2011, the right-wing propaganda nuts had managed to turn Obama into a toxic brand for conservatives. When I was first elected to Congress, we didn’t have any propaganda organization for conservatives, except maybe a magazine or two like National Review. The only people who used the internet were some geeks in Palo Alto. There was no Drudge Report. No Breitbart. No kooks on YouTube spreading dangerous nonsense like they did every day about Obama.

“He’s a secret Muslim!”

“He hates America!”

“He’s a communist!”

And of course the truly nutty business about his birth certificate. People really had been brainwashed into believing Barack Obama was some Manchurian candidate planning to betray America.

Mark Levin was the first to go on the radio and spout off this crazy nonsense. It got him ratings, so eventually he dragged Hannity and Rush to Looneyville along with him. My longtime friend Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, was not immune to this. He got swept into the conspiracies and the paranoia and became an almost unrecognizable figure.



Fox News CEO Roger Ailes in 2006. | Jim Cooper/AP

I’d known Ailes for a long time, since his work with George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s. He’d gone to college in Ohio, and since we had that connection, he sought me out at some event and introduced himself. Years later, in August of 1996, when I was in San Diego for the Republican National Convention, I ended up having dinner with Ailes and a veteran broadcasting executive named Rupert Murdoch. At that dinner they told me all about this new TV network they were starting. I had no idea I was listening to the outline of something that would make my life a living hell down the line. Sure enough, that October, Fox News hit the airwaves.


I kept in touch with Roger and starting in the early 2000s, I’d stop in and see him whenever I was in New York for fundraisers. We’d shoot the breeze and talk politics. We got to know each other pretty well.

Murdoch, on the other hand, was harder to know. Sometimes he’d invite me to watch the Super Bowl in the Fox box, or he’d stop by the office. Wherever he was, you could tell he was the man in charge. He was a businessman, pure and simple. He cared about ratings and the bottom line. He also wanted to make sure he was ahead of any political or policy developments coming down the line. He was always asking who was up, who was down, what bills could pass and what couldn’t. If he entertained any of the kooky conspiracy theories that started to take over his network, he kept it a secret from me. But he clearly didn’t have a problem with them if they helped ratings.

At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes. I once met him in New York during the Obama years to plead with him to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air. It was making my job trying to accomplish anything conservative that much harder. I didn’t expect this meeting to change anything, but I still thought it was bullshit, and I wanted Roger to know it.

When I put it to him like that, he didn’t have much to say. But he did go on and on about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which he thought was part of a grand conspiracy that led back to Hillary Clinton. Then he outlined elaborate plots by which George Soros and the Clintons and Obama (and whoever else came to mind) were trying to destroy him.

“They’re monitoring me,” he assured me about the Obama White House. He told me he had a “safe room” built so he couldn’t be spied on. His mansion was being protected by combat-ready security personnel, he said. There was a lot of conspiratorial talk. It was like he’d been reading whacked-out spy novels all weekend.

Quote:I thought I could get him to control the crazies, and instead I found myself talking to the president of the club.

And it was clear that he believed all of this crazy stuff. I walked out of that meeting in a daze. I just didn’t believe the entire federal government was so terrified of Roger Ailes that they’d break about a dozen laws to bring him down. I thought I could get him to control the crazies, and instead I found myself talking to the president of the club. One of us was crazy. Maybe it was me.


I have no idea what the relationship between Ailes and Murdoch was like, or if Ailes ever would go off on these paranoid tangents during meetings with his boss. But Murdoch must have thought Ailes was good for business, because he kept him in his job for years.

Places like Fox News were creating the wrong incentives. Sean Hannity was one of the worst. I’d known him for years, and we used to have a good relationship. But then he decided he felt like busting my ass every night on his show. So one day, in January of 2015, I finally called him and asked: “What the hell?” I wanted to know why he kept bashing House Republicans when we were actually trying to stand up to Obama.

“Well, you guys don’t have a plan,” he whined.

“Look,” I told him, “our plan is pretty simple: we’re just going to stand up for what we believe in as Republicans.”



Top: Fox News host Sean Hannity. Bottom: Conservative talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh (left) and Mark Levin (right). | AP photos

I guess that wasn’t good enough for him. The conversation didn’t progress very far. At some point I called him a nut. Anyway, it’s safe to say our relationship never got any better.

Besides the homegrown “talent” at Fox, with their choice of guests they were making people who used to be fringe characters into powerful media stars. One of the first prototypes out of their laboratory was a woman named Michele Bachmann.

Bachmann, who had represented Minnesota's 6th Congressional District since 2007 and made a name for herself as a lunatic ever since, came to meet with me in the busy period in late 2010 after the election. She wanted a seat on the Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful committee in the House. There were many members in line ahead of her for a post like this. People who had waited patiently for their turn and who also, by the way, weren’t wild-eyed crazies.

There was no way she was going to get on Ways and Means, the most prestigious committee in Congress, and jump ahead of everyone else in line. Not while I was Speaker. In earlier days, a member of Congress in her position wouldn’t even have dared ask for something like this. Sam Rayburn would have laughed her out of the city.

So I told her no—diplomatically, of course. But as she kept on talking, it dawned on me. This wasn’t a request of the Speaker of the House. This was a demand.

Her response to me was calm and matter-of-fact. “Well, then I’ll just have to go talk to Sean Hannity and everybody at Fox,” she said, “and Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and everybody else on the radio, and tell them that this is how John Boehner is treating the people who made it possible for the Republicans to take back the House.”

I wasn’t the one with the power, she was saying. I just thought I was. She had the power now.
She was right, of course.




On January 5, 2011, ahead of the vote that would officially make him Speaker of the House, Rep. Boehner and Rep. Michele Bachmann greet colleagues on the House floor. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images


She was a conservative media darling and, by then, the conservative media was already eyeing me skeptically. She had me where it hurt. Even if I wanted to help her, and I sure as hell didn’t, it wasn’t a decision I had the power to make on my own. That power belongs to a little-known but very important group called the Steering Committee.


I knew there was no way the Steering Committee would approve putting Bachmann on Ways and Means. The votes just weren’t there. If I even pushed the issue, they wouldn’t have let me leave the meeting without fastening me into a straitjacket. But then, Bachmann wouldn’t go on TV and the radio to explain the nuances of House Steering Committee procedure. She’d just rip my head off every night, over and over again. That was a headache I frankly didn’t want or need.


I suggested the House Intelligence committee to Bachmann as an alternative, and mercifully, she liked it. It would be a good perch for anyone wanting to build up their foreign policy chops for a run for president, which she was already considering— Lord help us all. None too pleased was the man preparing to take up the gavel as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers from Michigan, an army veteran who had also served in the FBI. So I took my lumps from Rogers, and Bachmann took her seat on the committee.

The funny thing is, Michele Bachmann turned out to be a very focused, hardworking member—even though she spent a few months later in 2011 on a short-lived campaign for president. She showed up to the committee, did her homework, and ended up winning over her fellow members with her dedication. Mike Rogers was impressed—and I have to admit, so was I. The whole situation ended up working out well for everyone. As one of those old Boehnerisms goes, “Get the right people on the bus, and help them find the right seat.”

In January 2011, as the new Republican House majority was settling in and I was getting adjusted to the Speakership, I was asked about the birth certificate business by Brian Williams of NBC News. My answer was simple: “The state of Hawaii has said that President Obama was born there. That’s good enough for me.” It was a simple statement of fact. But you would have thought I’d called Ronald Reagan a communist. I got all kinds of shit for it—emails, letters, phone calls. It went on for a couple weeks. I knew we would hear from some of the crazies, but I was surprised at just how many there really were.

All of this crap swirling around was going to make it tough for me to cut any deals with Obama as the new House Speaker. Of course, it has to be said that Obama didn’t help himself much either. He could come off as lecturing and haughty. He still wasn’t making Republican outreach a priority. But on the other hand—how do you find common cause with people who think you are a secret Kenyan Muslim traitor to America?



Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., chair of the Tea Party Caucus, listen as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky. speaks during a news conference with Tea Party leaders about the IRS targeting Tea Party groups, Thursday, May 16, 2013, on Capitol Hill in Washington. | AP Photo/Molly Riley

Under the new rules of Crazytown, I may have been Speaker, but I didn’t hold all the power. By 2013 the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks to fawning right-wing media and outrage-driven fundraising cash. And now they had a new head lunatic leading the way, who wasn’t even a House member. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz. He enlisted the crazy caucus of the GOP in what was a truly dumbass idea. Not that anybody asked me.

[BigPapaKain]

What a liberal putz that long time conservative is. Look how he betrayed his constituents and fellow party members by trying to have a platform for the Republican party and to pass actual conservative legislation.

[samhain]

I'd like to se this thoughts on Gym Jordan. I recall him labeling Jordan a "political terrorist" in a radio interview a few years back. I imagine he hates his guts.

Cruz is a pretty fascinating political figure. He gets by on pure assholism and not much else. This works out due to the hyper-redness of his state, but I'm not sure that will be the case much longer. The new voter supressionmeasures will certainly not hurt him in Texas, but that shit has a very high probability of backfiring on the GOP. It's a bad optic to the majority of the public, and the backlash is likely going to be massive at the polls. Nobody, not even people in his party, and not even the orange one at times, seems to be able to stand the guy.

It's hilarious that anyone in the GOP thinks it's a good idea to run him for the presidency. He's probably the most easily dislikable human being that you could possibly throw out there. I'd love to see it happen. He's not funny, he has a nothing personality, and he doesn't even attempt to hide the fact that he only gives a shit about himself. Trump was a soulless pile of walking dogshit. That said, Cruz is about .002 percent as interesting as Trump, and has 0 percent of his personality.

That's the rub with the success/fall of Trumpism. There's only one Donald Trump. The GOP arsonists had one shot with him and it's over. He's a unicorn. If anyone thinks that you can send a Cruz or Desantis out there saying and doing the things that Trump did and succeed, then they will soon learn the hard way what a dumb idea that is.

The movement Boehner speaks of is like a big fat GOP nutbag coke binge. It seemed awesome when all the lib smashing was going on for the last 4 years. Now, however, they're out of ideas save for the Q moron garbage and they're facing some awful national demographic shifts. It's going to be fun to watch them try to foot the bill for the last 4 years in terms of political capital. They are a dead party if they continue down this path.

[*jason*]

(04-02-2021, 10:57 AM)samhain Wrote: I'd like to se this thoughts on Gym Jordan. I recall him labeling Jordan a "political terrorist" in a radio interview a few years back. I imagine he hates his guts.

Cruz is a pretty fascinating political figure. He gets by on pure assholism and not much else. This works out due to the hyper-redness of his state, but I'm not sure that will be the case much longer. The new voter supressionmeasures will certainly not hurt him in Texas, but that shit has a very high probability of backfiring on the GOP. It's a bad optic to the majority of the public, and the backlash is likely going to be massive at the polls. Nobody, not even people in his party, and not even the orange one at times, seems to be able to stand the guy.

It's hilarious that anyone in the GOP thinks it's a good idea to run him for the presidency. He's probably the most easily dislikable human being that you could possibly throw out there. I'd love to see it happen. He's not funny, he has a nothing personality, and he doesn't even attempt to hide the fact that he only gives a shit about himself. Trump was a soulless pile of walking dogshit. That said, Cruz is about .002 percent as interesting as Trump, and has 0 percent of his personality.

That's the rub with the success/fall of Trumpism. There's only one Donald Trump. The GOP arsonists had one shot with him and it's over. He's a unicorn. If anyone thinks that you can send a Cruz or Desantis out there saying and doing the things that Trump did and succeed, then they will soon learn the hard way what a dumb idea that is.

The movement Boehner speaks of is like a big fat GOP nutbag coke binge. It seemed awesome when all the lib smashing was going on for the last 4 years. Now, however, they're out of ideas save for the Q moron garbage and they're facing some awful national demographic shifts. It's going to be fun to watch them try to foot the bill for the last 4 years in terms of political capital. They are a dead party if they continue down this path.

I heard it put best... Ted Cruz is a warm toilet seat in a dirty public restroom.

[TheUberHuber]

Lmao


https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2021/04/john-boehner-to-ted-cruz-go-****-yourself/

[NATI BENGALS]

Crazy thing is I actually miss this cry baby.

Republican Party is a joke. And with Fox News and their hyper partisan bullshit sensationalism leading the way and all the sheep who consume it on a daily basis there is no way out. It really is the prequel to Idiocracy.

Our democracy barely survived 45. Qannon was worse than the tea partiers. The next one will be even worse I imagine

[CKwi88]

Kind of reminds me of George W. Bush's remarks of worrying he will be the last Republican president.

For a party that has tirelessly tried to spin the narrative that the democratic party is going ultra-left and "socialist", it's sad to see the GOP becomes so beholden to the fringe.

[BigPapaKain]

(04-03-2021, 08:22 AM)CKwi88 Wrote: Kind of reminds me of George W. Bush's remarks of worrying he will be the last Republican president.

For a party that has tirelessly tried to spin the narrative that the democratic party is going ultra-left and "socialist", it's sad to see the GOP becomes so beholden to the fringe.

Gaslight. Obstruct. Project.

[samhain]

(04-03-2021, 08:22 AM)CKwi88 Wrote: Kind of reminds me of George W. Bush's remarks of worrying he will be the last Republican president.

For a party that has tirelessly tried to spin the narrative that the democratic party is going ultra-left and "socialist", it's sad to see the GOP becomes so beholden to the fringe.

The GOP is getting to be a lot like the liberals they hate so much.  For decades they've made hay at polls and in fundraising by pointing out how whiny and reactionary the left has been, and in many cases with legitimate reason.  

Now we have the right latching on to clowns like Qanon, where every single event that happens publicly is a conspiracy worth getting (sometimes even violently) outraged over.  They now have to pander to these morons in their base, forcing them to suspend any belief in reality and leaving them vulnerable to looking even more ridiculous than the liberals they once used for fear-mongering.  

The Q-idiots will likely have an even shorter shelf life of credibility than the libs did.  They are already the butt of jokes on both sides of the aisle, publicly and privately.  As they continue to be humiliated and treated like the clowns they are, it's a foregone conclusion that many of them will fly into violent rages just as the capitol rioters did on the 6th.  They will cost the GOP and pose an insurmountable challenge.  Even sane GOP legislators will have to pander to these people to win primaries.  This will lead to them getting rinsed when they face Democratic opposition in any state that isn't already deep-red.  People who actually vote will take the perceived lesser inconvenience of center-left values over raving terrorists doing pretend Dungeons and Dragons style role play as they search for a satanic cabal that doesn't exist.