There's A Republican For That...

It's too easy to dismiss John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, David Vitter, Virginia Foxx and even Rand Paul and Sharron Angle as merely a gaggle of crackpots and misanthropes unworthy of being taken seriously. All of them have won Republican primaries and some have won general elections. Inasmuch as they can implement their ideas and the agendas of the corporate CEOs and lobbyists who finance their careers, they're actually dangerous to our families and our country.

Two progressive public interest political action committees, Blue America and Americans For America, have teamed up to help expose some of the real dangers behind these characters. Today we're releasing our first video: Think Crazy. Digby's writing about Rand Paul and John is taking on his gal Sarah. I got stuck with Boehner. Watch the clip and see how this character who aspires to the speakership talks with such alacrity about raising the retirement age to 70. The actual Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, doesn't agree, not one bit. In fact, she told Netroots Nations this weekend that she doesn't see scaling back Social Security as a way to reduce a deficit that's ballooned out of control because of wars and bad economic policies of the conservative ruling elite. "To change Social Security in order to balance the budget, they aren't the same thing in my view. When you talk about reducing the deficit and Social Security, you're talking about apples and oranges."

And that's John Boehner... talking apples and oranges, doing what he can to confuse the voters. There's one way to make absolutely certain this guy never gets anywhere near the Speaker's chair-- elect Justin Coussoule to replace him in western Ohio's 8th congressional district. Think about giving Justin's campaign a boost, against the massive inflow of K Street lobbyist money that Boehner gets from his real constituents, the ones on Wall Street. Coussoule puts Boehner into clear context:

John Boehner has no idea what it's like to work for a living. Or if he ever did, he's long forgotten after spending 20 years in Washington living high on the hog, compliments of corporate contributions and lobbyists' largesse, and collecting $193,000 in annual salary compliments of the American taxpayer.

Case in point. After two decades of voting against the interests of working, middle-class Americans on every issue from the minimum wage, to affordable health care, to extension of unemployment benefits, in one of Boehner's more outrageous assaults on working Americans, he called for increasing the retirement age to 70. In other words, Boehner's answer to patching together the federal budget that he helped blow-up, at George W. Bush's command: make hard working Americans work longer and harder. I guess the super-rich who fund Boehner's lavish lifestyle get a pass.  

But then again, why should we expect someone who spends more time golfing than Tiger Woods (119 days last years alone), and twice the median annual income in his District on golf ($84,000 from his 'leadership' PAC on golf) to understand, let alone care, about the struggles of working people.

After all, the fairways of Pebble Beach couldn't be farther from the working-class neighborhoods of Hamilton, Dayton and Greenville in Ohio's 8th Congressional District. And John Boehner has much more important things to think about than the burden he would heap on working people by pushing the retirement age to 70. Like whether he wants lobster tail with his filet mignon when he gets back to the clubhouse.