Matt Taibbi: The Crying Shame of John Boehner

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-the-crying-shame-of-john-boehner-20110105?print=true

The new speaker is a lazy, double-talking shill for corporate interests. 
So how's he going to fare with the Tea Party?

John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched 
and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two 
decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American 
congressional sandwich. The biographer who somewhere down the 
line tackles the question of Boehner's legacy will do well to simply 
throw out any references to party affiliation, because the thing that 
has made Boehner who he is — the thing that has finally lifted him 
to the apex of legislative power in America — has almost nothing to 
do with his being a Republican.

The Truth About the Tea Party

The Democrats have plenty of creatures like Boehner. But in the new 
Speaker of the House, the Republicans own the perfect archetype — 
the quintessential example of the kind of glad-handing, double-
talking, K Street toady who has dominated the politics of both parties
for decades. In sports, we talk about athletes who are the "total 
package," and that term comes close to describing Boehner's talent 
for perpetuating our corrupt and debt-addled status quo: He's a five-
tool insider who can lie, cheat, steal, play golf, change his mind on 
command and do anything else his lobbyist buddies and campaign contributors require of him to get the job done.

This article appears in the January 20, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.
 The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the 
online archive January 7.

As for what that job is, here's the thing: In this age of greed-enabling bailouts and rampaging Tea Parties and coast-to-coast voter rage 
toward the entire political process, Congress in particular now ranks 
as one of the single most unpopular political entities on earth. Recent 
polls show that only 13 percent of Americans approve of the job 
performance of their national legislature — which makes our elected representatives even less popular here at home than, say, Al Qaeda is 
in Pakistan. (Bin Laden and Co. scored an 18 percent approval rating 
not long ago.)

The GOP's Dirty War

The reasons aren't hard to figure. Voters are fatigued not only by the seemingly endless kinky-sex and corruption scandals emanating from 
Capitol Hill, but also by the increasingly infuriating fact that no matter 
which party is in power, the leadership inevitably borrows like dice 
addicts on the Vegas strip and uses the money to pay for huge Frankensteinian initiatives that bloat the size and power of the federal government, often without semblance of sense or plan. The underlying dynamic is bought-off congressmen ignoring real social problems and 
using the legislative process to construct massive perpetual handouts 
for their campaign-contributor sponsors. Both parties have now made 
the servicing of the giant handout machine their primary raison d'être
 — and it's this perception, that Washington is occupied by an 
unbreakable bipartisan conspiracy of favor-churning hacks, that has 
inspired anti-Washington revolts like the Tea Party.

Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

"Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the Patriot Act — practically 
any significant piece of legislation that came out of the Bush presidency, 
it was a joke," says Chris Littleton, who heads a coalition of 58 Tea Party groups in Boehner's home state of Ohio.

The anger of Tea Partiers like Littleton erupted when they suddenly 
realized that their elected leaders in Congress had developed a primary allegiance not to constituents back home or even to ideology, but to themselves and their own dissolute, pay-for-play, you-scratch-mine, 
I'll-scratch-yours intramural bureaucratic calculus. Voters got mad 
when leaders covered up sex scandals, partied on corporate junkets 
when they should have been working on the public dime, wasted 
mountains of taxpayer money on political witch hunts instead of 
working to stave off another financial crisis or terrorist attack — 
and they got mad, especially, when congressional leaders stopped 
having the common decency to hide the lavish gifts funneled to them 
by their lobbyist pals in exchange for political favors, parading around 
in public with their goodies in hand without even caring how it looked.

The irony is, no one — no one — represents all of these bile-inspiring qualities better than John Boehner. His most striking achievement is 
that there's a check mark next to his name on virtually every entry on 
the list of common public complaints about Congress. And yet, when 
the Republicans rolled back into the control of the House this past 
November on the strength of a nationwide Throw-the-Bums-Out 
movement, it was Boehner, the prototypical bum, who somehow 
clambered onto the congressional throne. It's hard to imagine that in 
all of American political history there has been a more unlikely 
marriage than John Boehner and the pitchfork-wielding, incumbent-
eating Tea Party, whose blood ostensibly boils at the thought of 
business as usual. Because John Boehner is business as usual, a man 
devoted almost exclusively to ensuring his own political survival by 
tending faithfully to the corrupt and clanking Beltway machinery. 
How? Let us count the ways.

From the very start, Boehner's career has been a heartwarming tribute 
to the gentle spirituality and tender human connections that surround
 the experience of congressional service. Here's how he got into the 
House in the first place: His predecessor, a white Republican named 
Donald "Buz" Lukens, got caught on camera talking with a black woman 
at a McDonald's in Columbus, Ohio, about how he had slept with her 
teenage daughter. It came out later that Lukens, his negotiating skills 
honed by years of public service, had paid 40 bucks to the girl to have 
sex with him in his Columbus apartment.

Convicted of "contributing to the unruliness of a minor," old Buz 
refused to resign his seat, and so John Boehner, a young plastics 
salesman (plastics!), took him on in the primary and won on a 
platform of restoring morals and ethics to the Congress. Boehner 
then joined up with a group of other freshmen congressmen, including 
God-humping Pennsylvanian Rick Santorum, and formed the so-called 
Gang of Seven. The group made names for themselves by giving sanctimonious speeches blasting Democratic congressional leaders for 
things like getting free haircuts at the House barbershop and free 
meals at the Senate restaurant. Shortly thereafter, Boehner ascended
 to a leadership role himself after helping co-author the "Contract With America," and it wasn't long before the man who swept into office in 
the shiny red underpants of an ethical crusader was creating his own 
peculiar ethics record.

Forget about free haircuts: Boehner was soon caught literally handing 
out checks from the tobacco lobby on the floor of the House. This was 
1995; the House was voting to consider an end to federal subsidies of 
the tobacco industry, and Boehner, at the time the fourth-ranking 
Republican in the party hierarchy, went on the floor and handed out, 
by his own admission, "a half-dozen" donation checks from the 
tobacco lobby to various members.

Boehner only got busted when former-football-star-turned-GOP-congressman Steve Largent got wind of the check-passing and 
confronted Boehner about it. The fallout from the incident reveals the 
future House speaker at his absolute finest: While being interviewed 
by a television reporter about what he had done, Boehner with a 
straight face tries to turn the tables and present himself as an 
opponent of the practice.

"It's a practice that's gone on here for a long time that we're trying 
to stop, and I know that I'll never do it again," he deadpans. Asked 
how he feels about the episode, he says, "It's a bad practice. We've 
gotta stop it." While he may have stopped handing out checks on 
the floor of the House, Boehner didn't stop taking in lobbyist money 
and doing favors for his favorite industries. If you go back over his 
record, you'll find one instance after another of Boehner standing up 
on this or that issue in a way that dovetails perfectly with a pile of 
money that happens to have been sent to his PAC or his campaign 
fund from the industry that stood to benefit from his position. For 
years, Boehner was one of the largest recipients of campaign 
donations from UPS; by an amazing coincidence, he was also the 
sponsor of a bill that would have allowed companies that pay into 
group pension plans — like UPS — to cut pension benefits for their 
own employees if another employer in the group went out of business.
 In another curious connection between campaign funding and political 
favors, Boehner received hundreds of thousands of dollars from 
for-profit colleges and the private-student-loan industry — and 
then sponsored laws that restricted the Department of Education 
from making less expensive government loans to students, pushing 
for federal subsidies for private colleges and trade schools.

for the rest of this, go to
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-the-crying-shame-of-john-boehner-20110105?print=true

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