God grant John Boehner the continued physical strength and intellectual weakness of his operatic farce. A wiser Speaker would have stopped before now, would have reblended into the murmuring mob of House anonymity, would have cornered the known derangements of Michele Bachmann or Steven King into doing the dirtiest of his hypocritical work for him. But not our Johnny, God bless him.
No, our Johnny instead screamed his bad and phony faith to the world, though he nevertheless bothered addressing it yesterday specifically to Mr. Obama. Of the following 19 words in Mr. Boehner's letter to the president, see if you can guess which one would have never appeared in a letter to Mr. Predecessor:
"I respect your authority as Commander-in-Chief and support our troops as they carry out their mission. But ..." (<-- ding, ding, neon flashing, ding! ding! ding!)
It gets even worse. Boehner trails off into a comprehensive befuddlement about our strategy and goals in Libya -- virtually all of which Obama has already answered, repeatedly -- which when compared to Boehner's comprehensive lucidity about Bush's vastly greater sinkholes of Iraq and Afghanistan leads me to think that Mr. Boehner is either an idiot savant or ... it could be that he's just, ahem, explosively disingenuous.
My purpose here in even bothering with the rather peculiar Mr. Boehner is, however, less that of noting his partisan hypocrisy -- a real political yawner, for both sides -- than to reemphasize the much larger issue of the right's lost credibility: indeed more than lost, more than marooned, it's an abused thing of the desolate past, or rather should be a thing of the desolate past. None should be granted today.
Listening to the right about Obama's Libya after its Iraq is like listening to Nathan Bedford Forrest about better race relations. So there, I've reemphasized the point, with a tediousness I openly acknowledge.
Mine is not, though, an altogether unwarranted tediousness, because so many in the mainstream media persist in treating the likes of the wholly incredible Mr. Boehner with utter undue reverence and intellectual respect, such as HuffPost's Howard Fineman on Lawrence O'Donnell's program last night, or the Post's Jonathan Capehart this morning: "Boehner’s good questions for Obama on Libya."
By all means, gentlemen, you should question and probe and doubt. But for heaven's sake and ours, don't cite any unrehabilitated member of the neocon right as a credible source for your questions, probings and doubts. It's unseemly, and it not only weakens but shatters your case, to the limited extent you have one.