Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

I never liked John Boehner.  He struck me as the quintessential partisan, always carping, always, to be blunt, full of shit.  But that was before the Tea Party.  Now, I at least respect the guy's public service and commitment to his benighted vision of governance.

Boehner may not have understood that gentleness succeeds where rudeness fails, but, still, I think he would like to have accomplished something with BHO, as Tip O'Neill did with Reagan.  Boehner has been driven from office by the yahoos of the Tea Party.  These so-called "conservatives" - Russell Kirk would turn in his grave - think the best government is no government.  In a government designed to operate by compromise, they regard compromise as defeat and cowardice.  They are a very bad thing.  George Will, with whom I used to agree a lot more than I do these days, likes to say that our government was designed to be slow-moving.  He has been extolling the "slow" part as a virtue; let's see if he values the "moving" part at all.

The Tea Party is what you get when you cross a Gerrymander with a Populist.  Tea party members suffer from political anencephaly, and yet they live.  We cannot euthenize them - their parents are too strong.  So we throw tantrums like Trump and Sanders, a jingoist fascist and a classist socialist, because we cannot elect good Representatives.  And all the while, we don't know what Churchy Lafemme tried so hard to tell us: that we have met the enemy, and he is us.

The Republican voters sent to Washington people who declared their intention to muck things up, and now, those voters are upset either because their guys have mucked things up, or because they have not mucked them up enough.  Boehner's departure suggests, sadly, that the latter sentiment has won out.  As our presidents say when they are done spouting platitudes, May God bless and protect the United States of America.  I.e., Heaven help us.