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By: NATHANIEL BALLANTYNE
April 2, 2021
TRUENEWSBLOG- Former speaker of the House JOHN BOEHNER’S scorching new book, “ON THE HOUSE,” which will be out April 13 from St. Martin’s Press is a must read. It is the juicier political thriller this year and BOEHNER held nothing back.
The cover of the book featured the former speaker of the House looking very DON DRAPER as he relaxes with a suburban pour of red wine and a cigarette. Boehner, now a tobacco and marijuana lobbyist, appears like a guy beckoning the reader to a back room at the Jefferson Hotel where he’s finally going to tell you what he really thinks. Well, tell her did and you will enjoy it!
You’ll want to read the entire excerpt, which is a rollicking romp through the GOP in the years just before DONALD TRUMP. It was, in Boehner’s telling, the period in which fringe activists, right-wing media personalities and conspiracy theorists gradually took over the party and overthrew Boehner’s merlot-and-Camel establishment.
But to wet your appetite, here are some of our favorite parts of the piece, which is amusingly titled “Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia: How America’s center-right party started to lose its mind, as told by the man who tried to keep it sane.”
On the 2010 midterms: “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.”
On the BARACK OBAMA conspiracy theories: “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?”
On RUPERT MURDOCH: “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.”
On 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.”
On SEAN HANNITY: “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.’ 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.
On Sen. TED CRUZ (R-Texas): “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.”–
