Trying to get comfy after minor but painful surgery, I'm not in any mood to see more buffoonery from the Boehner Brigades.
So I decided to read a little on worst Speakers. There are some pips, but I had blanked the execrable Denny Hastert from memory.
You know, with the past 20 years peopled with Newtie, Tom DeLay and Hastert it's much easier to see this particular failure in leadership as part of a long march to Republican House oblivion. Yeah, I know Tommy the X-Terminator was not Speaker, but that's the point here.
Being a Repubuglican speaker is being a tool, a useful idiot, a minor cog. If there's a red president, you kowtow as if you're a junior Cabinet member. If there's a blue in the Oval Office, you stamp your feet and shriek, insisting that you are really the Zecutive Branch.
I know this isn't the finest essay on this topic on Kos, but I point you to The Nation, John Nichols, 2007.
I like to think Bumblin' Boehner isn't even bad enough to be THE Worst. Below the wiggedy:
Among the fifty men and one woman who have held the speakership since a German-born pastor named Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg filled the position for the First Congress, there have been more than a few disappointments. Aside from the indicted, the disgraced and the disreputable, there have been the indefensible -- like Howell Cobb, who used his pre-Civil War speakership to promote the extension of slavery. Cobb would eventually find his true calling as the speaker of the Provisional Confederate Congress and the acting president of the southern states that seceded from the U.S. in treasonous defense of human bondage.
Could the shambling, ineffectual and frequently inarticulate Hastert really have been a worse Speaker of the House than a crude proponent of slavery, or a crook like Jim Wright or a conniving partisan like Newt Gingrich? Absolutely.
Even the worst of his predecessors had respect for the House as a institution of Congress, the separate but equal legislative branch of the federal government. Hastert displayed no such understanding or commitment. He made the House during the three congresses in which his speakership coincided with the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney -- ironically, a man as a House member in the Reagan era coveted the post of Speaker and co-authored a history of the position -- something less than it was ever meant to be.
- See more at: http://www.thenation.com/...