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View Full Version : UK Telegraph: John Boehner - second of 12 kids - Obama's elitist target?




Cowlesy
09-18-2010, 07:49 PM
First, because so many posters will read the title and then reply on how much they don't like Boehner and complain I am supporting him, I am not a big John Boehner fan, though he did good work at opposing Obamacare and Climate Change (not that it was that hard to do).

But, the White House could have a major blunder on their hands here. The narrative they're trying to portray is Boehner as some crazy elitist.

Well the UK Telegraph went to where he grew up, talked to his sister, and it looks like he's an everyday guy who worked hard and made it (and perhaps DC has corrupted him). But he definitely wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth as the liberal media would like everyone to believe.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8009943/John-Boehner-the-second-of-12-kids-from-Ohio-who-is-Barack-Obamas-elitist-target.html



John Boehner: the second of 12 kids from Ohio who is Barack Obama's elitist target

By Toby Harnden, Reading, Ohio
Published: 8:09PM BST 17 Sep 2010

President Barack Obama is doing his best to turn Representative John Boehner, the House minority leader, into Public Enemy Number One. If Republicans win back the House of Representatives in November, as polls indicate, he will replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

In a recent speech, Mr Obama mentioned Mr Boehner by name nine times. A fundraising email sent out from BarackObama.com this week stated that corporate interests and lobbyists “have put all their chips on one man: Congressman John Boehner”.

Democrats have started a BeatBoehner.com website that claims he spent $1 million on "luxury hotels, exclusive golf resorts and gourmet dining for himself and his fat-cat contributors". On the I-75 freeway outside Cincinnati, a huge poster showing a tanned Mr Boehner playing golf accuses him of teeing off 119 times in a year.

Yet Mr Boehner's life story is the type of classic up-by-the-bootstraps tale of the American Dream that can put a tear in a voter's eye. As his story becomes better known, the Democrats could even be drawing favourable attention upon him. Right now, most Americans have never heard of Mr Boehner, and fewer still can pronounce his name, which rhymes with Rayner. The alleged elitist country club Republican is an Ohio Congressman who grew up in near poverty.

His sister Lynda Meineke, who is 51, is a waitress and bar tender at Andy's Cafe in Carthage, Ohio, a family business that was founded by their grandfather Andy Boehner in 1938. As a child, one of Mr Boehner's jobs was to mop the floor.

Sitting outside the bar this week, sipping a bottle of Bud Light and smoking a cigarette, Mrs Meineke described her childhood as "cramped" but happy. "We learned how to share. If there was a toy, it wasn't just for you but for all the younger ones."

Mr Boehner, 61, is the second of 12 who grew up in a German-Irish family in Reading, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati. All but two of them still live within a few miles of each other. Two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.

The future Congressman started work as a janitor and took seven years to get his degree – the first in the family to do so – because he had several jobs to pay his way. He joined a plastics and packaging company, rising to president before entering local politics by being elected to the town board.

The family house on Hill Street initially had two bedrooms with Mr Boehner and three brothers sleeping in one, their sister in another and their parents on a pull-out bed in the living room. Their father Earl later built a three-bedroom extension.

Mrs Meineke, whose husband is an unemployed builder, still lives in the modest house. She remembers her father rising at dawn to go off to the café, which he ran with his twin brother and was a favourite with truck drivers.

"Then my mother would get up before all of us, and drink coffee and listen to the radio, packing our lunches and writing our names on all the brown bags.

"Then she'd start waking us up. You knew that if you didn't get up you'd be cutting your time in the bathroom in half. Sometimes, the boys had to go outside and pee by the tree."

Mr Boehner's deep tan is often mocked by Democrats. At a dinner last year, Mr Obama said: "He is a person of colour, although not a colour that appears in the natural world."

Like Mr Obama, Mr Boehner is a keen golfer and a smoker. His sister sniggered at the suggestion her brother might ever have been on a tanning bed. The "dark hair and olive skin", she said, came from her mother.

Bob Boehner, 62, the oldest of the 12, who sells real estate and is "looking for work", said: "We were conservative because we had to be. There wasn't the money to spend frivolously on things. We grew our own vegetables up on the hill. We learned early on that if you wanted something you had to go out and work for it."

His brother's childhood, he thinks, was good training for Congress, where, if he becomes Speaker, he will have 435 members to control. "He tried to make the younger ones do their homework and get the room cleaned up. He was somewhat of an authority figure to the younger ones.

"John is still an everyday person and we need more people like that in Congress because too many people there have never had a job and never had to balance a budget before."

Some Republicans believe that Mr Obama has allowed his personal animus to drive an anti-Boehner campaign that could well backfire. Shortly after Mr Obama won the 2008 election, Mr Boehner described him as a "chicken shit" for voting "present" so many times in the Illinois Senate. Reacting to Mr Obama's health care bill, which narrowly passed but appears to be an electoral millstone around Democratic necks, Mr Boehner shouted "Hell, no you can't!" on the House floor.

Liberal elements of the American press have enthusiastically taken up the Democratic theme of Mr Boehner as an out-of-touch plutocrat.

When the "New York Times" ran a front-page story this week under the banner "A GOP Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists", Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama's press secretary, sent a web link to article via Twitter, stating: "Headline says it all."

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank obliged by a description of Mr Boehner's "polished tassel loafers and perfectly tailored suit, a quarter-inch of white cuff revealed at the wrist".

Mrs Meineke said that at family gatherings at Andy's Bar Mr Boehner's nephews were more impressed by his Secret Service guards than the Congressman himself. "You see how he talks to Obama. He tells it how it is, right there in black and white. If all they can find on him is that he plays golf and he has a tan, well, whatever."

You can read the rest at the link here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8009943/John-Boehner-the-second-of-12-kids-from-Ohio-who-is-Barack-Obamas-elitist-target.html)

nate895
09-18-2010, 08:33 PM
Doesn't surprise me at all. The Republicans might not be good (and the "from-poverty-to-power" story might be a reason why, more on that in another post I'm thinking about), but they are generally the "average joes" turned pols more so than Democrats. Even the poverty-to-power Democrats take a sort of "anointed one" path. Clinton might have started off poor, but he wound up being a Rhodes Scholar. That isn't exactly average joe material.

My point being that the Democrats can't march around acting like the Republicans are all a bunch of big business elitists while they are for blue collar workers everywhere. In reality, both are in both parties and we actually have to have a real debate about principles and policies if we want to get anywhere.

Austrian Econ Disciple
09-18-2010, 08:36 PM
Made it? MADE IT? I wouldn't exactly call a career of stealing "making it", but whatever floats your boat...

Cowlesy
09-18-2010, 11:48 PM
Made it? MADE IT? I wouldn't exactly call a career of stealing "making it", but whatever floats your boat...

LOL

Just wouldn't be the same without a demagogu'ish pontification from the Austrian Economic Disciple :P

Austrian Econ Disciple
09-18-2010, 11:51 PM
LOL

Just wouldn't be the same without a demagogu'ish pontification from the Austrian Economic Disciple :P

Glad you enjoy my pontifications :p Rousing mens hearts and spirits daily, I might say! (And the women too of course)

Cowlesy
09-18-2010, 11:53 PM
Glad you enjoy my pontifications :p Rousing mens hearts and spirits daily, I might say! (And the women too of course)

Hopefully some hearts and spirits are in fact roused, and only a minority of us hear *blarg blarg blah blah blarg blarg blahhhh you-don't-know-best-listen-to-me-i-know-what's-best-for-all-of-you-silly-children*!

Austrian Econ Disciple
09-18-2010, 11:54 PM
Hopefully some hearts and spirits are in fact roused, and only a minority of us hear *blarg blarg blah blah blarg blarg blahhhh you-don't-know-best-listen-to-me-i-know-what's-best-for-all-of-you-silly-children*!

If I wanted to do that, I would run for Congress.

Stary Hickory
09-18-2010, 11:59 PM
Well good story IMO, Boehner is good to have as an ally when he is on the right side of the issue. Just how often that happens is anyone's guess. But for me, he is going to be a big help in killing Obamacare. Guys like Boehner would not be too bad if they would quit supporting this insane foreign policy. That goes for the GOP in general (at least the non progressive side) if they had better foreign policy....we will see soon enough what they will and will not do.

If they do anything remotely resembling what they did under Bush they are finished. The only reason they are viable now is because the Obama administration is bat crazy and authoritarian nut jobs. I mean it takes a special kind of bad to make people risk looking at the GOP after what they did under Bush.

Cowlesy
09-19-2010, 12:02 AM
Well good story IMO, Boehner is good to have as an ally when he is on the right side of the issue. Just how often that happens is anyone's guess. But for me, he is going to be a big help in killing Obamacare. Guys like Boehner would not be too bad if they would quit supporting this insane foreign policy. That goes for the GOP in general (at least the non progressive side) if they had better foreign policy....we will see soon enough what they will and will not do.

If they do anything remotely resembling what they did under Bush they are finished. The only reason they are viable now is because the Obama administration is bat crazy and authoritarian nut jobs. I mean it takes a special kind of bad to make people risk looking at the GOP after what they did under Bush.

lololol, True statement.

akforme
09-19-2010, 12:13 AM
Insurance and big pharam are in his top 5 industries... I'm sure he's going to repeal it and make it lots better.

But Who care's, the article was a distraction in the first place.

crazyfacedjenkins
09-19-2010, 04:11 AM
YouTube - THE BAILOUT: GOP Leader John Boehner - Put Country First - Vote Yes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVOS1CC6V5I)

This fucking loser, cocksucker, piece of shit is the worst actor I've ever seen:

YouTube - Hell No You Can't! Leader Boehner Health Care Bill Debate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gPxZZBAwNY)

nobody's_hero
09-19-2010, 04:51 AM
Most often the liberal media gets it wrong and assumes that everyone who advocates for smaller government must be extremely well off and never cares for anyone who is living in poverty.

But, there have been plenty of leaders in this world who have gone from "nothing" to "something," and the world would have been better off had they remained as "nothings." D.C. has a way of taking you from rags to riches if you'll just give up your soul in the process.

cindy25
09-19-2010, 05:47 AM
the problem with Boehner is he is too traditional, his idea of Social security reform is to raise the retirement age to 70 over a 20 year period. and calls it a major cut.

Zippyjuan
09-19-2010, 01:20 PM
Obama attacks Boehner because he is basically the head of the opposition. The same reason Boehner attacks Obama. Politics.