The opening paragraphs of his new book are … awesome:
In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called “a shellacking.” And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name—and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category.
Retaking control of the House of Representatives put me in line to be the next Speaker of the House over the largest freshman Republican class in history: 87 newly elected members of the GOP. Since I was presiding over a large group of people who’d never sat in Congress, I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way.
He’s right about that. He’s also right that Ailes went nuts right along with the rest of them and it set the table for the full conspiracy theory radicalization of the American right:
At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes….[He went] 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.
“They’re monitoring me,” he assured me about the Obama White House. He told me he had a “safe room” built so he couldn’t be spied on. His mansion was being protected by combat-ready security personnel, he said. There was a lot of conspiratorial talk. It was like he’d been reading whacked-out spy novels all weekend.
And of course he hates Cruz. Who doesn’t?
Under the new rules of Crazytown, I may have been Speaker, but I didn’t hold all the power. By 2013 the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks to fawning right-wing media and outrage-driven fundraising cash. And now they had a new head lunatic leading the way, who wasn’t even a House member. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz. He enlisted the crazy caucus of the GOP in what was a truly dumbass idea. Not that anybody asked me.
That’s the least of it:
And then there’s Sean Hannity, who Boehner calls “one of the worst”:
The former top GOP leader is “one of the worst Republican speakers in history,” who reeks of “cigarette smoke and wine breath,” Hannity wrote in a Twitter tirade.
In excerpts published Friday from his upcoming book, titled On the House: A Washington Memoir, Boehner dishes on what he calls the GOP’s “crazy caucus” and how conservative media—specifically including Hannity—helped embolden right-wing ideologues such as Sen. Ted Cruz and former Rep. Michelle Bachmann, eventually paving the way for a President Donald Trump.
In response to the released excerpts, Hannity took to Twitter on Friday to fire back at the former GOP leader.
“John Boehner will go down in history as one of the worst Republican speakers in history,” Hannity tweeted. “He’s weak, timid and what’s up with all the crying John? There was not a single time I was around him when he didn’t just reek of cigarette smoke and wine breath.”
The Fox News host also snarked that he was glad Boehner “finally found his true calling in life in the ‘weed industry,’” referencing the former speaker’s post-congressional career as a pitchman for a marijuana investment firm.
Hannity further promised that he would have more to say on the subject when he is back on the air Monday.
The Fox star seemed to be reacting to book excerpts quoted by Axios, in which Boehner wrote that while they had once been on good terms, Hannity at one point decided to place a target on his back, which resulted in the disintegration of their relationship.
“Places like Fox News were creating the wrong incentives,” he wrote. “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. … At some point I called him a nut. Anyway, it’s safe to say our relationship never got any better.”
Elsewhere in the book, Boehner complained that Fox News pushing birther conspiracies and fringe characters made his job as the top House Republican nearly impossible as he tried to reign in the antics of his own caucus. At one point, Boehner recalled in excerpts quoted by Axios, he confronted the late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes—who was ousted from the network in 2016 following multiple sexual-misconduct allegations—and pleaded “with him to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air,” only for Ailes to go down his own conspiratorial rabbit holes.
“When I put it to him like that, he didn’t have much to say,” Boehner wrote. “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.”
Boehner also noted that Bachmann, described as a “lunatic” by the ex-speaker, once demanded that she be placed on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, only for Boehner to turn her down. In response, Bachmann threatened to go on Hannity’s show and say “this is how John Boehner is treating the people who made it possible for the Republicans to take back the House.”
He added: “I wasn’t the one with the power, she was saying. I just thought I was. She had the power now. She was right, of course.”
This isn’t the first time that Boehner has called out Hannity in the press, only for Hannity to respond in kind. In a lengthy Politico profile published in October 2017, Boehner unleashed on right-wing media, blaming figures such as Hannity and radio host Mark Levin for further polarizing America.
“I had a conversation with Hannity, probably about the beginning of 2015. I called him and said, ‘Listen, you’re nuts.’ We had this really blunt conversation,” Boehner told Politico at the time. “Things were better for a few months, and then it got back to being the same-old, same-old. Because I wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot.”
In response, the Fox News star insisted that “conversation never happened” and that the ex-speaker was “bitter,” all while asking Boehner if he was “sober when you said this.”
Lol. The entire party is now “right-wing idiots.”
I wasn’t a fan of Boehner, obviously. He’s a very conservative Republican and people like him laid the groundwork for the GOP lunacy we have to day. Some of us were warning about how that was going a long time ago. But he wasn’t stupid, evil or crazy. And that’s highly unusual in the Republican Party today.