Late on Election Night, President Obama attempted to call Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, but was told that both were asleep. During the evening of New Year’s Day, John Boehner refused to take phone calls from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Back during the negotiations over the debt ceiling in 2011, John Boehner refused to answer the president’s phone calls, leading the president to complain to Bob Woodward.
“I was pretty angry,” Obama told Woodward. “There’s no doubt I thought it was profoundly irresponsible, at that stage, not to call me back immediately and let me know what was going on.”
Alcoholism is a sickness that should warrant people’s sympathy rather than scorn. If John Boehner would ask for help or adopt a contrite attitude like Sen. Mike Crapo, it would be easy to lay off the criticism and not make such an issue of Boehner’s drinking. But he can’t do his job and he isn’t available to come to the phone in the evenings.
He was so visibly hammered during his speech at the Republican National Convention (a tradition that goes back at least as far as the 1996 convention in San Diego) that Michael Savage played his whole speech on the radio in order to mock his drunkenness. He was absolutely plastered on election night in 2010 (a year in which Joe Scarborough called him a “lazy drunk” on the air). For years people have been speculating that Boehner weeps so often in public because he is drunk so often in public.
Personally, I wouldn’t care about Boehner’s drinking if her were just a congressman. But he’s third in line to the presidency and he’s blotto half the time. He can’t answer phone calls from mayors and governors or even the president if those phone calls come late at night.
It’s ridiculous.
