We can pore over the tea leaves to try to determine what John Boehner is trying to accomplish, and why. But I think it is pointless. The simplest explanation is usually the best. John Boehner is not very good at his job. He doesn’t know what he is doing, or why. Stick with that hypothesis and you are unlikely to go wrong. The man is stumbling drunk before dinnertime every single day of the week. When the president tries to call him at night, he doesn’t come to the phone. That’s probably because he is passed out.
He doesn’t have the ability to lay out a budget plan as a counteroffer to the president because he doesn’t have a clue how the budget works, and neither does his staff. He’s a fraud and a buffoon. He can’t even figure out how to cave in. He’s just paralyzed. We’re going over the cliff because he can’t even come close to pulling his shit together to make an offer that Obama would accept and that would also be acceptable to his caucus.
“…the man is stumbling drunk before dinnertime every single day of the week. When the president tries to call him at night, he doesn’t come to the phone. That’s probably because he is passed out.”
Without proof this is completely out of bounds.
Are you kidding? Has a man ever made more public drunken appearances than Boehner? He was drunk at the RNC. Drunk on election night. Drunk when he attended the NASA event last year. Drunk on the floor of the House. Why don’t you google “John Boehner drunk video” and start sampling his body of drunken work.
I have little desire to see him, when I can’t avoid it he’s seemed fine. Since you provided proof then it’s not out of bounds.
It’s pretty much an open secret that Orange Julius likes the drink a little more than the average person.
I don’t understand why it can’t be called out, though. If Pelosi was getting shitfaced every night, we’d never hear the end of it.
Common knowledge. Even Scarborough talked about his laziness and penchant for getting to the bars by 5pm every day.
Go ask anyone in D.C. off the record. They’ll tell you what a drunken clown he is. It’s an open secret. Just like it was an open secret that Larry Craig was a closet case long before he got caught in the Minneapolis airport restroom.
Boehner got his requisite sound bite about the non-progress in the negotiations on the Newshour this evening. His speech was slurred. Not a lot, but enough to notice. If he hasn’t already been in the bottle today then he’s on something else.
Dude is sipping whiskey from about 11am on.
I can’t imagine how the man is still walking around, living and breathing and basically not being hospitalized. By all accounts he smokes as much as he drinks, and he’s what, mid-late 60s now? I keep thinking that orange color is a sign that his liver is continually sweating nicotine and ammonia. Must’ve won the cardio/pulmonary gene lottery.
also could barely open his eyes
Boehner is in a mess of his own making. He has no friends in the Republican party anymore; if you read any Red blogs, you can see how frustrated and angry they are with his lack of spine. They call him complicit with Obama and they say he has no leadership abilities.
This is from hardline Republicans! We Democrats just shrug and say we’ve known it all along. He is nothing more than a hollow suit with nice hair (sound familiar, Mittens?) who got elected by looking good and promising to promote the Party Line. What his voters didn’t realize is that he’s gutless and clueless; another Republican figurehead with no leadership abilities.
Let him suffer. He deserves it.
Yes, the baggers hate him and they have a couple of schemes to get him out of office. Will Boehner leave quietly or put a fight?
Depends on whether it’s before or after 5 p.m., I guess.
That sort of assumes that such a thing is logically possible. Since the Teahadist faction reflexively opposes anything that Obama finds acceptable, the intersection of “an offer that Obama would accept” and “would also be acceptable to [the GOP] caucus” might well be the empty set.
In that case, heavy drinking could a rational response. So is resigning.
This is definitely a large part of it. Boehner may still be incompetent, but the Teahadists have made governing even more impossible for the Republicans than usual.
There is a great article in the American Prospect about how lame and totally wimpy Obama has been in appointing federal judges.
When people criticize this guy, some have a kneejerk reaction to defend him as some great president.
No. He is NOT. He’s just better than the alternative. He’s a self-absorbed man that has hardly any political skills. And no time for liberals or progressives.
The article is http://prospect.org/article/courts-how-obama-dropped-ball.
As further proof of what a loser he really is….the Susan Rice announcement.
The one where she withdrew her name?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/susan-rice-withdraws-as-candidate-for-secretar
y-of-state/2012/12/13/17ad344e-4567-11e2-8e70-e1993528222d_story.html?hpid=z1
God that pisses me off. I was really hoping the trend of female SoS would continue.
So while I didn’t think she should have been attacked over Benghazi I was agnostic on whether she should be SoS or not.
managed to get universal healthcare passed – something Ds had been trying to get for 60 years.
managed to end DADT with military buy-in
managed to beat the Clinton political machine as a black man named Barack Obama
got re-elected with a larger majority than most were predicting
So yes I think he has proven to be a very good, if not great President and politician, and no that isn’t knee-jerk. That is based on what I have seen him and his administration accomplish.
You can’t even acknowledge how bad he’s been on judges or education?
I don’t think that means he is a “self-absorbed man that has hardly any political skills” and that was the particular point I was responding to. As I said a man with “hardly any political skills” would not have accomplished what he did even as I didn’t always agree with all of his policies.
Education? I think Race to the Top speaks for itself. An excellent demonstration of what government can accomplish with efficiency.
On Judicial appointments, Obama knows the Republicans can gum up his nominations in the Senate. Filibuster reform may change this. Like a lot of liberals, you act as if Obama were monarch. Never before has a president faced this kind of all-out opposition.
Well, is there any variety of “conservative” Repub Speaker other than the incompetent buffoon? Newt Turdrich, Rassler Denny Hastert and now Tobbacco Bagman Boner the Drunk. With Eric Cantor waiting in the wings, haha.
A greater collection of fools, frauds and flim-flammers would be hard to compile. As we have all been saying ad infinitum, today’s GOoPers can’t govern. They don’t want to, and couldn’t do it if they DID want to. They don’t elect Speakers who could govern. They seek instability and chaos in gub’mint. They are the supreme definition of failure, corruption and hackery.
That’s “conservatism”…..
You forgot Tom Delay. By the way, is he serving his jail time yet?
Tom DeLay was never Speaker. He did rule the House, with Hastert as his puppet, so it’s easy to mistake him for the Speaker.
Thanks, my bad: he was Whip and House Majority Leader.
every word you wrote about ORANGE JULIUS is true.
It was nice to see Obama play the role of a real leader with balls during the first couple weeks after the election. Now it’s back to the spineless wuss who let us down so badly in 2009-2011. If Obama can’t stand up to Lindsay Graham and a laughably pathetic John McCain how can he stand up to our real enemies – like Netanyahu – or Romney in the first debate, lying through his teeth unchallenged. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he said okay when they found Bin Laden. But if he’d had to actually negotiate with Bin Laden he would have wound up ordering a drone strike on the Capitol building.
Boehner got elected to Congress (now he represents the Ohio 8 CD) long before I moved here in ’06. The western part of Ohio from Paulding County all the way south to Hamilton, Ohio has been reliably Repub since the 60s, as far as I know. Maybe longer.
John Boehner plays a lot of golf. Yet he could only stand seven weeks of Navy Boot Camp before he was discharged with a bad back.
In the 6 Nov election, there was no Dem on the ballot opposing him. In 2010, Justin Coussoule ran as a Dem opposing Boehner. Coussoule got no support from the DCCC and got 31% of the vote.
In 2008, The Dem running against Boehner got 37% of the vote.
So while Boehner has no leadership skills, he knows how to finance Repubs running for office and call in those chips when it is time to vote for Speaker.
I think Boehner is trying to do the same thing Obama is trying to do: look like he’s serious about cutting a deal before the end of the year, while not actually ever cutting one, and get the public to blame Obama for it. Going over the fiscal cliff means that the Republicans don’t end up with their fingerprints on tax hikes and defense cuts.
He’s just not as good at making the other side look like the bad guys as Barack Obama is.
If we go over the fiscal curb, Boehner’s and Rep lack of leadership and ability to accomplish anything put the sequestration fixes into immediate peril
An article on what happens to NIH & research to grants in application stage and the health of our science community without immediate repair of funding is astounding and the Boehner party has convinced me that they don’t comprehend the setback for a generation that is on the chopping block.
I daresay, even if they did comprehend the full implications, they wouldn’t care; science is against their religion.
“Science? We don’t need no stinking science!”