I don't think so. I think he probably loves his country. He just has a strange way of showing it.
I don't know Speaker Boehner, but I get the feeling he's an old-fashioned pol, the kind of guy who would have been a big player in Tammany Hall machine politics in another era. The kind of guy who would hand out tobacco company checks on the House floor to members of Congress who had voted the "right" way, in fact.
But now Boehner is in a jam. He's stuck between the Tea Party and the Republican base, i.e., the very wealthy. To see where the Tea Party is coming from, check out a true moron named William Temple, chairman of Tea Party Founding Fathers. Temple is a yahoo who dresses in colonial clothing, as if he understood the first thing about history (or economics). Temple says the Tea Party will have a very simple rating system for politicians in 2012: if they vote to raise the debt ceiling, they get a score of 0. If they don't, they score 100.
Now, not raising the debt ceiling would be economically catastrophic for the country. The consequences would make the recession of 2008 look like a golden age. Temple's misguided "love" of his country looks a lot more like contempt, when you look at what he's really saying. And then he goes farther, offering politicians an out--if they demonstrate hatred for their fellow Americans, they might be able to skate on the debt ceiling thing.
So that's what Boehner has to contend with. In a season when dopes like Donald Chump are driving independents and rational thinkers away from the Republicans, he can't afford to lose the Tea Party, too.
But what the Tea Party wants is bad for the country. Not just a little bit bad...disastrously bad.
So Boehner appeared before a Wall Street audience today, and said this:
"Without significant spending cuts and reforms to reduce our debt, there will be no debt limit increase. And the cuts should be greater than the accompanying increase in debt authority the president is given."
Boehner went on to say he's talking about trillions of dollars in spending cuts.
He added, "The mere threat of tax hikes causes uncertainty for job creators -- uncertainty that results in less risk-taking and fewer jobs."
Now, he is wrong here on so many different levels it's hard to know where to begin.
The main thing is, we do not need trillions of dollars in cuts. Especially now. Now we need spending. We need jobs. We need to push the slender recovery in the right direction, not squash it just as it's getting started.
Later--after the economy is running more smoothly--we should look at the deficit. We should deal with it in a balanced way that includes increased revenue as well as decreased spending.
But now we have millions out of work, we have a housing market that can't get its legs under it. We need the government spending on infrastructure, on education, on R&D. We need a government that can push money into the economy, because nobody else is. And what causes uncertainty for those job creators is not the threat of tax hikes, it's the fact that customers aren't walking through their doors.
And it's the idea--just the threat, never mind the reality--that we might not raise the debt ceiling. That we might let the government of the United States default on its obligations.
That terrifies job creators, and it terrifies those folks on Wall Street Boehner was talking to.
Just to claim that he's going to refuse to raise it is bad for the economy. No sane person would do that. Not if he had any understanding of economics at all.
Unless... unless his one and only goal is crashing the economy enough to damage President Obama's reelection effort.
So I ask again... does Boehner love his country, or hate it? Does he want Americans to suffer in order to help his party's electoral chances?
The jury is still out. But it's not looking good.
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