Share us!

Monday, January 17, 2011

So after 4 productive years John Boehner takes the helm

Don't worry too much about it. Matt Taibbi strikes again illustrating how The Tea Party wants more than pomp and presentation which is the only thing John Boehner has to offer:

THE CRYING SHAME OF JOHN BOEHNER:





"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."

-JUMP

"This is where Boehner comes in: He represents the last stand of the Bush Republicans against this rising tide of public anger. The GOP establishment want the energy of the Tea Party, but they don't want to have to work for it. They're hoping — and they have plenty of reasons to have this hope — that the vast majority of Tea Partiers will be dazzled by their new status in Congress, or be willing to be bought off with corporate money, or be just plain dumb enough to fall for whatever pulled-out-of-the-ass phony reform rhetoric that guys like Boehner come up with, instead of making real changes to the way Congress does business. In a hilarious example of the former, Boehner with a straight face recently announced that he would push to cut committee budgets and member allowances by five percent, for an anticipated savings of — cue the clueless Dr. Evil laugh — $30 million. "It likely would be one of the first votes we cast," Boehner declared proudly, failing to recognize that paying for trillion-dollar bailouts and $900 billion tax breaks by cutting $30 million at a time is a little like planning a hostile takeover of IBM with a stack of Rite Aid coupons. That's not government; it's stand-up comedy. As for the sweeping changes that the Tea Party is looking for — Littleton's personal litmus test is deep cuts in both defense spending and Social Security — it's virtually unimaginable that Boehner will push for such a radical agenda. When Littleton met with party leaders after the election and asked what programs they are willing to cut, he was brushed aside. "We're going to be discussing that in April," he was told."

No comments:

Post a Comment