Did you see all the golf references in the 60 Minutes segment on Rep. John Boehner? You can thank your donations to Blue America and Americans for AmericaPac, because CBS contacted us for permission to use our "golf ads" in their program. Lesley Stahl brought up his golf game a couple of times as she gave CBS a puff piece on Boehner just in time for Christmas.
I didn't really expect too much from her, but it would have been nice to mention a little of his sordid history of handing out checks from Big Tobacco if she was going to do a personal profile.
In this 1996 documentary by PBS called "The People and the Power Game," John Boehner is caught red-handed in an amazing act of corruption, and his biggest critics are fellow Republicans.
Boehner: Mine asked me to give out a half dozen checks quickly before we got to the end of the month and I complied. I did it on the House floor which I regret and I should not have done, it's not a violation of the House rules, but it's a practice that's gone on here for a long time.
Were the checks from tobacco companies?
Boehner: Ahh, I think if my memory serves me correctly, I think it was a tobacco company, yes.
Q)....but in this case tobacco's well timed contributions helped save its subsidy. The people that were passing out the checks won.
He did say that he's never been to a tanning salon before so I guess it's all that golf he plays in the bright sunlight that gives him that orange hue. Lesley also got hung up on the fact that President Obama repeatedly said that the Republicans were holding America hostage.
Stahl: He basically called you a hostage-taker.
Boehner: Excuse me, Mr. President. I thought the election was over. You know, you get a lot of that heated rhetoric during an election. But now it's time to govern.
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Stahl: There have been moments of disrespect shown to President Obama.
Boehner: Well, there was some disrespect, I would suggest, that was shown to me yesterday by the president.
Boehner repeatedly attacked the Democratic Party and the President too many times for me to recount but here's a few:
Hmmm. So let's see now. This would be the same John Boehner who threw an hour-long hissy fit on the House floor, called President Obama a "leftist" (when you stop laughing so hard, remember that David Gregory didn't bother to challenge him on that either), promised to do everything within his power to make it difficult to pass health care reform, advocated layoffs of police and firefighters rather than compromise on the stimulus bill, and called President Obama a socialist before lying about calling him a socialist.
He's so sensitive, or is he? One of the most alarming things in this interview was the fact that he starts crying like a baby at the drop of a hat. There's "sensitive" and then there's pathological. It was truly bizarre. People think that's it's hard for an actor to cry during a scene, but watching Boehner weep more often than Glenn Beck illustrates that it's not very hard at all.
And on election night, in his victory speech, the public saw something they probably never expected from Boehner: it was called "the sob heard round the world."
Can you imagine if Democratic politicians acted this way? FOX News would be running stories 24/7 about how al-Qaeda and all the lone wolf cells would be emboldened to terrorism because of their weakness. It would be non-stop.
How serious is a man like John Boehner after all? Here's his take on global warming with the very serious George Stephanopoulos.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So what is the responsible way? That's my question. What is the Republican plan to deal with carbon emissions, which every major scientific organization has said is contributing to climate change?
BOEHNER: George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide. And so I think it's clear...
Stahl missed that one too. His Tea Party allies will not be pleased as soon as he has to vote to raise the debt ceiling, but just think about it. He's like the choice after VP Biden to take over the White House in case of an unforeseen emergency.
