We used to ceaselessly complain about John Boehner back when he was the Speaker of the House in the Obama administration. Little did we know how good we had it and how badly we’d eventually yearn for those days. This was back during a time when the most powerful Republican in Washington could – and did – golf with President Obama and actually appeared in Obama’s spoof video at the last White House Correspondents dinner. Oh, and Boehner pretty-well hated half his caucus and wrote a smashing book to tell them to go to hell, where he’s got a particularly humid spot reserved for them.

It is safe to say that Boehner – like everyone else – hates Ted Cruz:

“There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz.”

Thinks he’s smarter than everyone else? We guarantee Ted is going to read that and think to himself, “Yeah, but I am smarter than everyone else.” Guarantee. Ted is an asshole.

Boehner also laid out the fact that his entire caucus had become frenzied, schizophrenic, conspiracy freaks, perhaps because their media god was a paranoid conspiracy freak:

At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes. I once met him in New York during the Obama years to plead with him to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air. It was making my job trying to accomplish anything conservative that much harder. I didn’t expect this meeting to change anything, but I still thought it was bullshit, and I wanted Roger to know it.

When I put it to him like that, he didn’t have much to say. But he did go on and on about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which he thought was part of a grand conspiracy that led back to Hillary Clinton. Then he outlined elaborate plots by which George Soros and the Clintons and Obama (and whoever else came to mind) were trying to destroy him.“

Holy shit! We walk around in a world where we sort of presume that the actual people at FOX are winking at each other and know that they’re making millions off the most gullible people on earth and that they’re just selling bullshit. We didn’t expect, nor know, that they actually believed their own conspiracy convulsions.

And, just – wow. We wonder what could possibly have “changed” in 2008? A “blah… man” became president.

But Boehner was just as pissed off and amazed by Sean Hannity:

Places like Fox News were creating the wrong incentives. Sean Hannity was one of the worst. I’d known him for years, and we used to have a good relationship. But then he decided he felt like busting my ass every night on his show. So one day, in January of 2015, I finally called him and asked: “What the hell?” I wanted to know why he kept bashing House Republicans when we were actually trying to stand up to Obama.

“Well, you guys don’t have a plan,” he whined.

“Look,” I told him, “our plan is pretty simple: we’re just going to stand up for what we believe in as Republicans.”

I guess that wasn’t good enough for him. The conversation didn’t progress very far. At some point I called him a nut. Anyway, it’s safe to say our relationship never got any better.

Sean is very very lucky that Boehner stuck with “nut” and didn’t use any other, more colorful, names that he might have considered. Boehner comes off as kind of likable. We didn’t know how good we had it.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak