"Do I look like some kind of leader?"
Leadership,
Republican-style:
House Speaker John A. Boehner called last fall’s government shutdown a “very predictable disaster” that he warned his fellow Republicans to avoid, but ultimately went along with it at the behest of colleagues intent on a standoff with President Obama over his healthcare law. [...]
“When I looked up, I saw my colleagues going this way. And you learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk,” he said. “So I said, ‘You want to fight this fight? I'll go fight the fight with you.’ But it was a very predictable disaster.” [...]
“I like to describe my job as trying to get 218 frogs in a wheelbarrow long enough to pass a bill. It’s hard to do.”
Baloney. All Boehner had to do was hold a vote. With Democrats and the slightly-less-insane Republicans, he had more than enough votes to avoid the shutdown altogether. Instead, he chose to kowtow to the Tea Party wing of his caucus because holding onto his gavel was more important than the hundreds of thousands of lives that were disrupted and the
$24 billion that his little exercise in "leadership" cost the rest of us.
