Max Read | Gawker
Republican House minority leader John Boehner has been using a dumb–trust me, really dumb–line involving Johnny Cash in some recent speeches. Cash’s daughter Roseanne doesn’t think much of that. And she let Boehner know, by calling him “asshat.”
I bet Boehner’s speechwriters all gave each other high fives when they thought of this line:
Remember when Ronald Reagan was president? We had Bob Hope. We had Johnny Cash. Think about where we are today. We have got President Obama. But we have no hope and we have no cash.
And, well, yes, it is a very stupid line, even by stump-speech standards, but it’s pretty successful at ignoring any kind of socio-historico-cultural accuracy (I mean, Johnny Cash, a Reagan-era cultural touchstone?) in favor of connecting three vaguely iconic Americans in some kind of nostalgia wonderland as though they really had anything to do with each other, like the rhetorical equivalent of those airbrushed t-shirts where Kurt Cobain is jamming out with Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis is there or something.
Anyway, instead of high-fiving each other, they might have wondered what Cash’s outspoken daughter, singer and author Roseanne, would say. Turns out, she called him an “asshat”:
“Asshat”! Well, it’s not an unfair description of Boehner. Now, see if you can put together a stump speech line constructed the same as Boehner’s, but using the minority leader’s name, to mean an erection.
[via Politico/Ben Smith; images via Getty]
The original version of the story appears here: http://gawker.com/5679142/john-boehner-stop-using-my-dads-name-as-a-punchline-you-asshat
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