Meet John Boehner: Why He Cries, Why He's a Hypocrite

John Boehner will be the new Speaker of the House when they return after the new year.  He is already being known for his penchant for tears.

Great little essay about what makes him tear up--and how his voting record belies his supposed values:

The American Dream that Boehner evokes between tears has never been more threatened. By some measures, social mobility — that is, the ability of people to move up a notch in class — is at an all-time low in this country. Poor Americans now have less than a 5 percent chance of rising to the upper-middle-class within their lifetimes.

At the same time, the gap between the rich and poor, and the concentration of wealth owned by those at the very top, has never been so great. After examining these trends, The Economist wrote that “the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”

Numerous studies have shown that what knocks people out of the middle class, or keeps them from ever joining it, is a catastrophic bill or two — usually from getting sick and not having health care. Then, those debts go on credit cards, which leads to a misery hole of high interest and limited choices.

Against this backdrop, Boehner has fought against strivers and strugglers at the lower end, while shilling for ever-more concentrated corporate power and banker control. The one thing that stirs his passion is tax cuts. But nearly half of American households don’t pay any income tax at all, so Boehner’s crusade doesn’t affect them. And a decade of aggressive tax-cutting has done nothing to reverse the woes of everyday working people.

Gail Collins also addressed John Boehner's Tears in her column last week:

Many of us first noticed his tendency toward tears when he appeared on election night to celebrate his party’s taking control of the House. He had hardly gotten in front of the microphone before things got watery.

“I spent my whole life chasing (sob) the American dream,” he told the cameras. “Put myself through school, working every rotten job there was ...”

The American Dream has had such a bad year. During the campaign, it was tossed around by billionaire candidates who insisted on telling groups of underprivileged children that they, too, could someday own a mega-yacht or run a slimy but extremely profitable health care corporation.

Now, John Boehner is blaming the Dream for making him howl like an abandoned puppy. It’s what my friend Rebecca Traister calls “Boehner doing Masterpiece Theater on the hard life of John Boehner.”

Boehner is opposed to extending unemployment benefits for the jobless, and he wants to kill off the law that guarantees health coverage to all Americans. So you know when he starts weeping when his wife says she’s “real proud” of him, it’s not a sign of softness.

In 2007, he cried while delivering a speech on the floor of the House, in support of funding for the war in Iraq. “After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to stand up and take them on?” he sobbed.

Then this year, he voted against providing money to take care of our fellow citizens who became ill while doing rescue and reclamation work at ground zero after the terrorist attack.

Twice.

Oy.

Here's some video footage:


Sniff.