Boehner Blames GOP Woes on Talk Radio

John Boehner closed out his long reign as House Speaker with an interview blaming the rise of conservative media for the troubles currently plaguing the Republican Party.

“We’ve always had conservatives around here,” said Boehner on Wednesday. “Go back 20 years, you’ve got the first Republican majority in 40 years. We have one radio talk show host that no one had ever heard of. We have one 24-news channel that just did news. Today we have hundreds of talk show hosts each trying to out-right the others in terms of gaining an audience. […]And so what’s happening is people are being pulled to one of two camps, leaving almost nobody in the middle. And the ability of a small group of members of some small outside organizations to stir up angst or mislead people has been amplified.”

In his tirade against the media, Boehner sounded like Mitt Romney, who said last week that all of these news outlets were creating a situation where everyone was getting a different set of facts.

Funny, though, how none of these establishment types had a problem with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News back in the 90s when the conservative uprising was boosting their careers. No, it’s only now that their brand of business-friendly conservatism is losing steam that they want to return to the days of three dominant networks and the New York Times.

Wednesday night at the debate, Senator Marco Rubio had the best line of the night when he rejected Donald Trump’s warning against super PACS. “The Democrats have their own super PAC,” he said. “It’s called the mainstream media.”

Isn’t it the truth. The rise of conservative media has changed the nature of political discussion in this country, and that’s not a bad thing. At last, Americans have access to a whole different side of politics, and we are starting to see how deep the Washington deception runs. Men like John Boehner are disgruntled, but that’s only natural. When time passes you by, you’re going to gripe about it.

Nothing against Boehner or the rest of the Republican establishment. They are – by and large – good conservatives who were right for their time. But they failed to notice how extreme the Democrats have gotten since President Obama took office. They failed to notice the extraordinary dissatisfaction from the base. They kept running the government as though we were back in the 90s with Bill Clinton in the White House. They never switched strategies to deal with a radical socialist who wanted to fundamentally change the country into something it was never meant to be.

Conservative media didn’t cost Boehner his job. Boehner and the anemic Republican Party caused the rise of conservative media.