Sunday Morning Follies

Newly minted Majority Leader of the House John Boehner was pummeled, just pummeled, on Meet the Press this morning.

I don't think Russert was softballing. He described all the lavish trips Boehner has taken on lobbyists' dimes over the years, including 8 trips he took to an exclusive resort town in West Virginia. Boehner's excuse was that "these meetings are in nice places," and he basically rejected any cessation of this trips, just approval by the House Ethics Committee. He claimed that the Ethics Committee was working again, when it's been dormant for close to five years. He dismissed calls for an outside office of Public Integrity, after admitting that the problem was enforcement of the existing rules. Clearly the Congress is unable to police themselves, but this guy called basically for business as usual.

Boehner is being touted as a reformer, but that's ridiculous. He was supposed to give them the APPEARANCE of change without any change. The problem is he's not committed to any change of any kind. He admitted to passing out PAC checks on the floor of Congress while it was in session, I hadn't seen that before. He called it both "a mistake" and "a longtime practice," which was damaging.

On Abramoff, he opened an attack line for Democrats. When questioned about Indian tribe money that flowed to him from Abramoff clients, he said that he never knew Abramoff and that the money given to him by the tribes had nothing to do with Abramoff. This is what Democrats have been saying all along, and now they can quote the House Majority Leader when pressed. The difference in Boehner's case, of course, is that he never received any tribal money before Abramoff became associated with the tribes.

And on the issues, he admitted that if Iraq is the same in November, the Republican majority in Congress is in danger. Not the kind of inspiring talk you want out of the Majority Leader.