If you haven’t gotten around to reading Matt Taibbi’s fun and informative Rolling Stone profile, The Crying Shame of John Boehner, I recommend it. But not for this passage which appears to contradict the sentiment I was pointing to the other day:
The fact that Boehner supported TARP and No Child Left Behind and mega-handouts to the pharmaceutical industry and a range of other federal subsidies is hardly surprising, for this is what mainstream Washington politicians of both parties do — they take great buttloads of money from giant transnational companies, play golf with the CEOs of those same companies (“If someone I’ve gotten to know on the golf course comes into my office with a good argument,” Boehner once said, “I tend to want to listen”), and deliver taxpayer money back to their buddies when the need arises, or sometimes even when the need doesn’t arise.
Again, that’s not my experience of “what mainstream Washington politicians of both parties do.” Earlier in the piece Taibbi notes that:
[Boehner’s] political action committee spent almost $83,000 on golf events in 2009, and over the past 18 months he has run up a $67,000 tab at the Ritz-Carlton golf resort in Naples, Florida. He flew on a corporate jet 45 times between 2000 and 2007, and took at least 41 other corporate-sponsored trips in the past decade.
I don’t doubt for a minute that there are other egregious offenders and I favor addressing those abuses. But statements like Taibbi’s suggesting that all of them are corrupt and living like corporate chieftains is wrong. Language like that, while not as ugly or threatening, is as harmful to the political climate as is the violent language we’ve all taken to discussing since Tucson.