My contempt for John Boehner is boundless, but I do admire the way he gets revenge. Here’s one good example from his new book.

Mr. Boehner also relays an encounter in his office in which Mark Meadows, then a Republican representative from North Carolina and a leader of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, dropped to his knees to beg for forgiveness after a political coup attempt against Mr. Boehner failed.

“Not long after the vote — a vote that like many of the Freedom Caucus’s efforts ended in abject failure — I was told that Meadows wanted to meet with me one-on-one,” Mr. Boehner recalled. “Before I knew it, he had dropped off the couch and was on his knees. Right there on my rug. That was a first. His hands came together in front of him as if he were about to pray. ‘Mr. Speaker, please forgive me,’ he said, or words to that effect.”

Mr. Boehner says he wondered, in the moment, what Mr. Meadows’s “elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears, but that wasn’t my problem.”

Mr. Boehner looks down at the man who would later become Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff.

“I took a long, slow drag of my Camel cigarette,” he writes. “Let the tension hang there a little, you know? I looked at my pack of Camels on the desk next to me, then I looked down at him, and asked (as if I didn’t know): ‘For what?’”

This would be a better story if Meadows hadn’t eventually succeeded in forcing Boehner out and subsequently become, however briefly, the second most powerful man in the world as the president’s chief of staff. Still, this revelation will leave a permanent mark on Meadows, and I thank Boehner for providing us with this service.

I’m less impressed with new admission that impeaching Bill Clinton was a mistake that he should not have supported. I’m glad he’s reconsidered and gone on the record about it, but it does very little to change my thoroughly unfavorable opinion of Boehner’s record as a politician or his character as a person.

The most important thing he’s saying now has to do with the January 6 insurrection:

And he issues a stinging denunciation of Donald J. Trump, saying that the now former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.”

We actually need Republicans to say this is in precisely this direct and uncompromising way because there can be no legitimate debate about it. So, that’s two things Boehner has done that gratify me, which is two more than I ever thought he’d provide.