On Friday, Politico published an excerpt from On the House, a forthcoming memoir by John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, that, in Politico’s words, is the story of “how America’s center-right party started to lose its mind, as told by the man who tried to keep it sane.” The excerpt made quite a splash. Politico’s Playbook team called it “juicy,” and noted that the book’s cover—which shows a crisply-suited Boehner with a goblet of red wine in his hand and tendrils of cigarette smoke wafting up from an ashtray to his left—is “very Don Draper.” Journalists admired the tightness of Boehner’s lede: “You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name—and [in 2010], by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category.” Jonathan Swan, of Axios, reported that in “wine-soaked” recording sessions for his audiobook, Boehner went off-script to “insert random violent attacks on Ted Cruz”; by way of receipts, Swan tweeted a clip of Boehner waxing lyrical about freedom, then telling Cruz to “go fuck yourself.” The clip was replayed on TV, under bleeps of various lengths. Boehner sees right-wing media as a key factor in his party’s mind loss, and it’s a central theme of the Politico excerpt. “When I was first elected to Congress, we didn’t have any propaganda organization for conservatives, except maybe a magazine or two like National Review,” he writes. “There was no Drudge Report. No Breitbart. No kooks on YouTube spreading dangerous... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2021-04-05 12:13:42 UTC ]
A few months ago, after I picked up and devoured a beautifully written memoir by Elisa Hategan and was left with a serious Continue reading at HuffPost
[ HuffPost | 2017-01-03 15:48:11 UTC ]
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