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Ryan Says Obamacare Is Around for Good if Hillary Clinton Wins

Mother Jones

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HuffPo’s Jeffrey Young passes along a radio interview of Paul Ryan:

Obamacare doesn’t get repealed, likely ever, if Hillary wins….Agree?

Yes. Yes, I do agree….All of us have basically gotten to consensus on what our plan is, but we have to win an election to put it in place.

OK, that’s good to hear. Except for one thing: remember what Ryan’s predecessor said a couple of days after the 2012 election? Diane Sawyer asked John Boehner if he still planned to repeal Obamacare:

I think the election changes that. It’s pretty clear the president was reelected. Obamacare is the law of the land.

As I recall, Boehner was immediately savaged for saying this, and within a few months House Republican passed yet another Obamacare repeal. Since then they’ve voted to repeal Obamacare nearly a dozen times or so, depending on how you count. The most recent attempt was in February of this year.

If Ryan is smart, he’ll call it quits on Obamacare repeal and work instead on finding places where he can horsetrade with Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, I don’t know if Ryan is smart. Nor do I know if his caucus will allow him to move on even if he wants to. We’ll see.

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Ryan Says Obamacare Is Around for Good if Hillary Clinton Wins

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Mike Pence and the Failure of the Republican Establishment

Mother Jones

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When Mike Pence took the stage for the vice-presidential debate, he was not there only as Donald Trump’s second; he was also representing the Republican establishment that has cravenly acquiesced to Trumpism. As something of a surrogate for the entire GOP, Pence, the governor of Indiana, often tried to sidestep Tim Kaine’s pointed criticisms of Trump. But he could not avoid defending his running mate on key matters—and cleaning up after the GOP’s acerbic nominee.

Pence claimed that it was untrue that he and Trump had praised Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. (They have both called him a strong leader.) He said that Trump would not support legislation to punish women who obtain abortions. (Trump has said that “some form of punishment” would be necessary if abortion were made illegal.) He declared that Trump would implement “broad-shoulder” leadership in foreign affairs and adopt a muscular stance against Russia’s military intervention in Syria. (Trump has said Russian airstrikes in Syria were “okay” with him.) He denied that Trump has called for spreading nuclear weapons to nations they don’t currently possess them. (Trump has.) Pence scoffed at Kaine’s insistence that Trump has hurled abuse and invective on the campaign trail and asserted it was Hillary Clinton who was mounting an “insult-driven” campaign. He defended the Trump Foundation—which has been cited for various violations and which Trump has apparently used for his own personal and pay-to-play ends—while attacking the Clinton Foundation falsely for spending only 10 percent of its funding on charitable work. (The figure is close to 90 percent.) All the thrusts and parries aside, Pence’s most important role was serving as normalizer-in-chief.

As many Republicans say—some in public, some in private—Trump is at best not a serious man and at worst a threat to the nation. He is arrogant, impulsive, and erratic, a loudmouth and boorish know-it-all who doesn’t know nearly as much as he believes. He has mocked the disabled. He exhibits no discipline. He threatens war too readily and expresses admiration for tyrannical leaders (especially Putin). He shows signs of a troubled and troubling personality. He cannot admit error and doesn’t take advice. (After the first debate, his aides had to complain about Trump’s lack of preparation and poor performance to New York Times reporters in order to get his attention.) He is a serial purveyor of outlandishly false claims and crackpot conspiracy theories, including birtherism (which he hardly renounced). He changes positions on a whim. He denies saying what he has already said (or doesn’t remember). He routinely derides minorities and denigrates and body-shames women. He attacked a Gold Star family and equated his business career with the sacrifice of military service. (He also likened trying to avoid STDs while sleeping around in the 1970s with serving in Vietnam.) He speaks and tweets recklessly. He has encouraged violence. He has threatened to undermine electoral democracy. He has egged on Russia to hack the United States. He refuses to disclose key information about his business dealings and finances, which include hefty loans from overseas banks. He runs a crooked foundation. He is no model family guy. He has been accused of fraud in several lawsuits. He stiffed working-class contractors. He exploited the tax system to live like a billionaire—which he may well not be—while possibly paying no federal taxes.

Many GOP leaders realize all this and earlier in the presidential campaign expressed their anti-Trump views. House Speaker Paul Ryan criticized Trump for making “racist” remarks. Sen. Marco Rubio called the celebrity mogul “dangerous,” insisting that he was a “con man” unqualified to be president. Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Trump “is without substance when one scratches below the surface. He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: A toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.” Top Republicans considered Trump harmful to their party—his campaign was alienating the voting blocs GOPers had hoped to court: women, Latinos, African Americans—and to the national political discourse. Many believed that a President Trump could jeopardize the country’s well-being.

Yet most of the GOP top-dogs have jumped on the Trump trolley, even though they see an unstable and risky fellow is at the helm. Ryan, Rubio, and Perry are now official endorsers of Trump. So is Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who refuses to talk about Trump. (“Because I choose not to,” he explains.) Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), whose wife and father were insulted by Trump and who tried to define himself as a principled conservative by not endorsing Trump at the GOP convention in July, eventually kissed the ring. On Monday night, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) declared that Trump “absolutely” was a role model. (After that remarked sparked a social media controversy, Ayotte, who is in a tight reelection battle, claimed she had misspoke.) And consider the pathetic case of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Trump started his presidential campaign by blasting McCain for being a loser who was captured in Vietnam. And yet McCain says he is supporting Trump.

All these Republicans know that Trump was unfamiliar with the nuclear triad. They know that he is lying when he says he knows more about ISIS than the generals. (Before the first presidential debate, while on Facebook Live, I asked Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a prominent Trump supporter, if she thought that Trump was better informed about ISIS than the US military leadership. She kept attempting to change the subject. I pressed her repeatedly. She would not answer the question—for the obvious reason.) Most GOP leaders know that a Muslim ban is a stupid idea, an act of bigotry that cannot be implemented and that would be counterproductive to the effort against violent extremism. (Pence tweeted last year that it was “offensive and unconstitutional.”) They also are smart enough to realize that encouraging supporters to chant “lock her up” demeans the national debate and undermines political stability. In another setting, they probably would acknowledge that such ignorance, arrogance, and bullying ought to be a disqualification for anyone seeking to become the commander in chief.

Still, most of the GOP elite—including elected Republican officials and the brass and staff at the Republican National Committee—have accepted Trump, and Pence is the grand marshal of this parade. A former House member and a stalwart conservative, he was a wise pick for Trump, for he had the cred to legitimize Trump. And Pence has enthusiastically tried to wrap the cloak of normalcy around the former reality television star. As a loyal No. 2, he repeatedly makes excuses for Trump’s conduct—even when it contradicts Pence’s core principles. In 1990, Pence ran for Congress and lost in a race that was notably marked by a barrage of nasty ads from Pence’s side. Afterward, he swore off such tactics and wrote a confessional article in which he denounced negative campaigning. “First, a campaign ought to demonstrate the basic human decency of the candidate,” he opined. “That means your First Amendment rights end at the tip of your opponent’s nose—even in the matter of political rhetoric.” He added that negative attacks are “wrong” because they distract voters from the important issues. He claimed that after his loss in the 1990 election, he underwent a “conversion” on the topic of negative ads: “A campaign ought to be about the advancement of issues whose success or failure is more significant than that of the candidate.”

With that noble tenet in mind, Pence went on to win a House seat. Yet as Trump’s sidekick, Pence has had to put his principles in a blind trust and kick his clean-campaigning values to the curb. It is without question that in modern times Trump has been the nastiest major-party presidential candidate. He bullied and name-called his way to the GOP nomination, and he has maliciously assaulted Hillary Clinton, labeling her a criminal, claiming in fact-free and sexist fashion that she does not possess sufficient “stamina” or a “presidential look,” and, most recently, accusing her of cheating on her husband (without offering any evidence). And Pence has been Trump’s defender at each turn. To make the situation even more ludicrous, Pence has lashed out at Democrats when they have criticized Trump, saying, “I don’t think name calling has any place in public life.” Unless you’re on the ticket with the best name-caller of all time. Pence, it seems, is playing the Michael Palin part in Monty Python’s famous Dead Parrot sketch: denying the obvious to an infinitely absurd degree. At the debate, he continued to depict Trump as the victim of harsh assaults.

With such a performance, Pence essentially speaks for the GOP elite, refusing to acknowledge the reality of Trump. Many Trump-accepting Rs will say that they have no choice because they find Clinton so odious. Oh, they don’t believe the balderdash about Benghazi or the conspiracy theories about the Clinton Foundation, and they don’t think the the email controversy is a capital crime. In fact, many of them feel more comfortable with Clinton’s centrist foreign policy reflexes than Trump’s inconsistent stances and Putin-coddling. Their problem is not with Clinton; it’s with their own voters.

During the Obama years, the GOP base has been encouraged to believe the worst about President Barack Obama—he’s a secret socialist Kenya-born Muslim who is plotting to destroy America!—and that hatred has been easily transferred to Clinton, who in the 1990s, with her husband, was the primary target of right-wing loathing. Republican elites cannot get on the wrong side of this raging Clinton animus. Nor can they stand against the bigotry and populist anti-government antipathy within their party that they have fueled or played footsie with. One example: in 2012, Mitt Romney eagerly embraced Trump, when the real estate developer was going full birther. (Romney, earlier this year, was one of Trump’s chief antagonists. But he has gone silent in recent months. A Romney confidant tells me that Romney reached the conclusion that further attacks from him could well help Trump.) Another example: three years earlier, when a couple thousand tea partiers gathered on Capitol Hill to protest Obamacare, they questioned Obama’s citizenship, depicted him as Sambo, and called him a traitor. Referring to Obamacare, the crowd shouted, “Nazis! Nazis!” The entire House Republican leadership, led by Rep. John Boehner, was there, and Boehner did not admonish the crowd for its excessive rhetoric. He got into the spirit, calling Obamacare the “greatest threat to freedom I have seen.”

By exploiting instead of addressing the anti-Obama fever within their party, Republicans leaders helped set the foundation for Trump’s towering candidacy. And with his nomination came crunch time. The choice was this: keep trying to ride the tiger or denounce the beast within. Not prepared to confront a plurality, if not a majority, of the GOP base and trigger a bloody all-out civil war that could well put their own political careers at risk, Republican poobahs had only one course of action: to pretend that Trump is acceptable. They did not have the courage, spunk, or fortitude to take on the forces they had encouraged. So now many GOPers must make believe that Trump would be a fine president and offer a neverending series of excuses and rationales—that is, when they cannot avoid talking about him.

This is not ideological. Trump is no conservative hero for whom Republicans must fall in line. Michael Reagan this week said that neither Nancy Reagan nor his father Ronald Reagan would have supported Trump. But doing so is no problem for Pence, who proudly describes himself as a Reagan conservative. Pence also is self-proclaimed evangelical who is now crusading for a fellow who has not practiced family values. And he has had to put aside bedrock policy principles—free trade and support for the Iraq war—to saddle up with Trump.

Pence is the GOP’s primary justifier for Trump—his only serious, brand-name surrogate. (Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie have become clownish Trumpbots.) This is his job. And as unattractive as it might look from the outside, this might be a better position than losing gubernatorial candidate, for his reelection prospects were dim. (All this national attention could be helpful should he run for president in 2020 or 2024.) So when Trump says Obama was the “founder” of ISIS, Pence explains what Trump really meant. When Trump says Clinton’s Secret Service detail should be removed, Pence explains what Trump really meant. When Trump falsely claims the Clinton started the racist birther allegation, Pence explains what Trump really meant. He has regularized Trump’s cruelty, bigotry, vulgarity, and say-anything dishonesty.

In 1964, Republicans adopted this slogan in support of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater: “In your heart, you know he’s right.” Fifty-two years later, it’s pretty clear that for many elite Republicans, this mantra does not apply in this election. In green rooms across Washington, DC, Republicans admit that and shake their heads, upset that their party has reached this (sad!) point. In their heart, they know that Trump is wrong for the White House. They just don’t have the guts to do anything about it.

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Mike Pence and the Failure of the Republican Establishment

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Fox News rejects ads making fun of Fox News

Crazy Like A Fox

Fox News rejects ads making fun of Fox News

By on Jul 16, 2016Share

This summer, the Partnership for Responsible Growth — a bipartisan organization advocating for market-based solutions to climate change — is running a series of ads targeting conservatives. One shows conservatives leaders like George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and John Boehner (remember them?) talking about the need for climate on action.

The ad will air multiple times a day on Fox News in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. during the Republican convention.

What will not run on Fox News, however, is an alternate version of the ad that takes aim at the channel itself. Fox News and other media properties owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch have a long history of misreporting climate science, to put it lightly: One study found that 93 percent of the network’s representations of climate science were misleading or inaccurate.

The Partnership for Responsible Growth isn’t the only group going after Fox News. Friends of the Earth has their own faux ad too: As a news anchor who looks like she would fit right in behind the Fox News desk reports on a series of extreme weather disasters, water starts to submerge her. “What will it take for Fox News to accept that humans are changing the climate?” the narrator asks as water reaches her chin.

Not this ad, apparently — the network rejected it.

“We want to call out the nefarious role Fox News plays by keeping its audience confused about the climate threat to the country and world,” said Friends of the Earth U.S. President Erich Pica. “Of course Fox News climate distortion is a big part of why Donald Trump and Republican elected officials also deny climate change, to the nation’s physical and economic peril.”

Ignoring climate change may be bad for humanity, but, hey, it sure is good for comedy.

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Fox News rejects ads making fun of Fox News

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How Big a Dick Is Ted Cruz? A Quiz.

Mother Jones

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Against my better judgment sometimes, I have focused most of my campaign reporting energy on making the case against Donald Trump. But there are other candidates out there who are plenty loathsome in their own way, and when you say the word “loathsome” Ted Cruz comes immediately to mind.

Over at the mothership, Tim Murphy and David Corn make the case that Ted is really one of the all-time huge pricks. Take this quiz first to test your knowledge of Cruzology, and then go read it.

  1. Did one of Ted’s former pastors say that “he pretty much memorized the Bible, but I think he did it mostly so that he could humiliate kids who got quotes wrong”?
  2. Did a veteran of the 2000 George Bush campaign say that “the quickest way for a meeting to end would be for Ted to come in”?
  3. Did Ted’s wife once admit that Ted “can be a bit of a jackass sometimes, but at least you know where he’s coming from”?
  4. Did Bob Dole say that Ted “doesn’t have any friends in Congress”?
  5. Did Mitch McConnell respond that “I’m pretty sure Dole is wrong, but I can’t figure out who his one friend is”?
  6. Did a John McCain advisor say that his boss “fucking hates Cruz”?
  7. Did President Obama once get overheard asking Joe Biden “what in God’s name is that asshole’s problem, anyway”?
  8. Did Rep. Peter King say say about a possible Ted Cruz nomination, “I hope that day never comes; I will jump off that bridge when we come to it”?
  9. Did John Boehner quip that Ted was “a great American resource; when we threatened to deport him back to Canada, they suddenly agreed to drop their softwood lumber subsidies”?
  10. Did Lindsey Graham say the choice between Trump and Cruz was like having to choose between “death by being shot or poisoning”?
  11. Did a former high school teacher just shake his head and close his door when a reporter knocked and asked what he remembered about Ted?
  12. Did a former law school acquaintance say that when she agreed to carpool with Ted, “We hadn’t left Manhattan before he asked my IQ”?
  13. Did Ted’s torts professor remark that “I don’t think there was a single question I asked the entire year where Ted didn’t instantly raise his hand and practically wet his pants pleading to be called on”?
  14. Did his Princeton freshman roommate call Ted “a nightmare of a human being” and claim he would get invited to parties hosted by seniors because the upperclassmen pitied him?
  15. Did a college girlfriend of Ted’s say “he was pretty smart, but sex with him once was enough—if you can call it sex”?
  16. Is it true that in interviews with four of Ted’s college acquaintances, “four independently offered the word ‘creepy'”?

Answer: All statements whose ordinal number takes the integer form 2n+1 or 2n-1 have been invented. The rest are real

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How Big a Dick Is Ted Cruz? A Quiz.

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These Senators Want To Break the NRA’s Stranglehold on Gun Violence Research

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For years, Congress has blocked funding for research into the impacts of guns on public health. On Wednesday morning, twenty Senate Democrats demanded a necessary first step to upset that status quo, by asking the Government Accountability Office to audit what health programs exist to make guns safer.

“With more than 300 million guns in American homes, we write to request that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) conduct a study to assess the efficacy of public health and safety programs designed to impact gun safety, including the storage and security of guns in households throughout our country,” they wrote in a letter to Gene Dorado, Comptroller General of the United States.

The senators note that other federal public health campaigns, such as those to reduce drunk driving and smoking, have been hugely effective. But for nearly 20 years, Congress has pushed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to steer clear of firearms violence research. “I’m sorry, but a gun is not a disease,” said former House Speaker John Boehner this summer, after the House Appropriations Committee voted to block funding on gun research to the CDC.

“Prevention of gun deaths and injuries should be an essential component of the federal government’s commitment to public heath and safety along with other efforts such as background checks on gun purchases and closing other gun loopholes,” the senators wrote.

A Mother Jones investigation, inspired by the lack of research on the matter, found that gun violence costs Americans a whopping $229 billion each year. A Washington Post investigation found that Americans are getting shot by toddlers on a weekly basis.

The senators’ request was lauded by gun control advocacy groups. “The American people have had enough of gun violence and this is an important step,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Read the full letter below:

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Letter to GAO on Gun Safety (PDF)

Letter to GAO on Gun Safety (Text)

Watch part of our investigation into the costs of gun violence here:

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These Senators Want To Break the NRA’s Stranglehold on Gun Violence Research

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House Hostage Takers Give Up, But Promise Plenty of Hostages in Future

Mother Jones

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The good news today is that John Boehner is apparently making good on his promise to “clean the barn” before he leaves by cutting a budget deal with the White House. From the New York Times: “The accord would avert a potentially cataclysmic default on the government’s debt and dispense with perhaps the most divisive issue in Washington just before Speaker John A. Boehner is expected to turn over his gavel to Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin.”

Then there’s today’s schadenfreude-ish news: House super-conservatives are sad because they don’t think there’s anything they can do to halt this reckless attempt to keep the government running and pay our legal debts. Reuters: “Representatives Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and Mick Mulvaney, founders of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, told Reuters in an interview that there was not enough time for House Republicans to rally around a list of demands for raising the $18.1 trillion U.S. borrowing limit.”

Then there’s today’s bad news:

Leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives’ most influential conservative group told Reuters on Monday it was too late to stop an extension of the federal debt ceiling this week, but they will not hold it against the expected next House Speaker, Paul Ryan.

….The three lawmakers said they wanted to work with Ryan on process reforms that would allow them to get a much earlier start on future fiscal deadlines to demand spending cuts and reforms to federal benefits programs such as Social Security and Medicare. This way, they would not be trying to craft a strategy at the last minute with default or government shutdowns looming in the balance.

….Mulvaney said Ryan’s first big test would be a spending bill to keep government agencies open past a current shutdown deadline of Dec. 11. This would have to produce “at least something better than we would have gotten under Mr. Boehner.”

So they’ve given up on provoking a debt limit/government shutdown crisis for now, but by God they expect Ryan to give them enough time to provoke plenty of them in the future. And that starts in six weeks, Mr. Speaker.

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House Hostage Takers Give Up, But Promise Plenty of Hostages in Future

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Report: John Boehner Is the Guy Who’s Kept the Hillary Email Scandal Alive

Mother Jones

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Back when the Benghazi committee started up, Rep. Trey Gowdy swore that it was nothing more than an impartial search for the truth about a raid that cost four American lives. So how is that coming along? The New York Times reports:

Now, 17 months later — longer than the Watergate investigation lasted — interviews with current and former committee staff members as well as internal committee documents reviewed by The New York Times show the extent to which the focus of the committee’s work has shifted from the circumstances surrounding the Benghazi attack to the politically charged issue of Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

….The committee has conducted only one of a dozen interviews that Mr. Gowdy said in February that he planned to hold with prominent intelligence, Defense Department and White House officials, and it has held none of the nine public hearings — with titles such as “Why Were We in Libya?” — that internal documents show have been proposed.

At the same time, the committee has added at least 18 current and former State Department officials to its roster of witnesses, including three speechwriters and an information technology specialist who maintained Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.

From the standpoint of a genuine Benghazi investigation, Hillary Clinton’s email issues wouldn’t matter. All the committee would care about is getting a look at the emails from her private server—which is now happening. For some reason, though, they care deeply about investigating that email server to death, even though it has nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks. Why is that?

A friend of mine has tried to persuade me that Gowdy is probably playing things straight. I’ve argued that I don’t believe it. He’s a true believer, and he cares a lot more about taking down Democrats than he does about Benghazi itself, which he probably knows perfectly well has already been investigated to death. So which of us is right? This tidbit sheds a bit of light on things:

Gowdy said that at one point this spring he told John A. Boehner, the House speaker, that he feared the task of investigating the email issue would distract from his committee’s work….and pressed Mr. Boehner to have another House committee examine the matter of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, but that Mr. Boehner had rejected the request.

….Senior Republican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing confidential conversations, said that Mr. Boehner had long been suspicious of the administration’s handling of the attacks and that Mrs. Clinton’s emails gave him a way to keep the issue alive and to cause political problems for her campaign. But he thought that the task was too delicate to entrust to others and that it should remain with Mr. Gowdy, the former prosecutor.

If this is true, my friend is halfway right: Gowdy never really wanted to get distracted with politically motivated attacks on Hillary Clinton. But John Boehner did, and he figured Gowdy was the best man for the job.

I’m not quite sure what this says about Gowdy, but it’s certainly clear that Boehner thought that manipulating the media into nonstop reporting on Hillary’s email server was a great idea. He also figured the media would take the bait. And they did.

So Gowdy gets, oh, let’s say a C+. He tried to do the right thing, but caved in pretty quickly. Boehner gets a D. He was all about taking down Hillary Clinton from the get-go. The media gets an F. Boehner at least has the excuse of being a senior Republican leader, and attacking Democrats comes with the territory. But the media is not supposed to be so gullible that they believe everything Republicans say about Democratic leaders. In the case of Hillary Clinton, though, that rule seems to have been suspended. Again.

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Report: John Boehner Is the Guy Who’s Kept the Hillary Email Scandal Alive

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Congressional Republicans Are in Total Chaos

Mother Jones

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GOP land went crazy on Thursday when Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) abruptly pulled out of the race to replace Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) as House speaker. Tweets and headlines frequently employed the word “chaos” to describe what happened after McCarthy withdrew. The news caused major reverberations throughout the political world, yet much of the rest of the country was probably wondering why everybody was freaking out. Here’s a quick primer:

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Congressional Republicans Are in Total Chaos

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Admit It: You’re Kinda Going to Miss John Boehner

Mother Jones

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Speaker of the House John Boehner is leaving Congress, and my boss David Corn says good riddance.

In November 2009, he and other GOP leaders hosted an anti-Obamacare rally at the Capitol, where enraged protesters chanted, “Nazis, Nazis,” in reference to Democrats working to enact the Affordable Care Act. Boehner never tried to tamp down this sort of conservative anger. He did not tell the birthers to knock it off. He encouraged Obama hatred, allowing the Benghazistas to run free and filing a lawsuit against Obama to satisfy the Obama haters. Ultimately, he became a prisoner of these passions, and his speakership became mainly about one thing: preserving his own job.

This is all true enough. Allow me to present an alternative view: I kind of like John Boehner, and so should you.

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Admit It: You’re Kinda Going to Miss John Boehner

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Boehner Resigns, Cruz Explodes, Shutdown Averted

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The always charming Ted Cruz reacts to the news that John Boehner will be resigning from Congress next month:

If it is correct that the speaker, before he resigns, has cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi to fund the Obama administration for the rest of its tenure, to fund Obamacare, to fund executive amnesty, to fund Planned Parenthood, to fund implementation of this Iran deal — and then, presumably, to land in a cushy K Street job after joining with the Democrats to implement all of President Obama’s priorities, that is not the behavior one would expect of a Republican speaker of the House.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t true:

Following Boehner’s announcement, House Republicans said there was agreement to pass a clean spending bill to keep the government open. Several members of the Freedom Caucus, the conservative group which led the revolt against Boehner’s leadership, said they will now support the spending bill without demands that it include language to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood.

So no deal with the evil Nancy Pelosi was necessary. Imagine that. I guess we’ll have to wait and see about the cushy K Street job, though.

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Boehner Resigns, Cruz Explodes, Shutdown Averted

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