Weakness? Yes. But not the kind of girly weakness Republicans accuse Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi of betraying. Anyway, Sean Hannity reminds us that when someone on the right weeps, it's never weakness.
Hannity, of course, might not concede that tears and narcissism sometimes go hand-in-hand. Generally unmoved by the plight of others, narcissists weep when they experience a little emotional upheaval when thinking about their own lives.
The columnists have been having a field day over John Boehner's tears. Timothy Egan writes in the Times about Boehner's blurps.
What’s been missing is the reason why Boehner cries so much. Around Washington, he’s known as a chain-smoking, Merlot-swilling, golf-loving conservative hardliner. Lobbyists love him, no more so than when he handed out checks from the tobacco industry to compliant members of Congress on the House floor.
It’s when he talks about how he rose from his humble past — the son of a bar owner, one of 12 children who grew up in a small home with a single bathroom — that Boehner starts to weep.
“Making sure these kids have a shot at the American Dream like I did is very important,” he said, choking up, when asked on “60 Minutes” about his crying.
Boehner's brain lives in another planet from his tear-production machine. The tear-production machine is triggered by self-love, not the pragmatism of Boehner's brain. Egan points out that the Weeper Speaker has to know very well he has never given a damn about "giving kids a shot at the American Dream." He has spent much of his political life deliberately standing in the way of kids getting a shot at anything he had.
... A look at Boehner’s record during his two decades in Congress shows a man who has voted against nearly every boost for the working stiff. There’s no empathy for those with the longest shots at the American Dream in his voting pattern. Instead, we see a politician who is hard-hearted in his legislative treatment of the people now coping with the kind of economic conditions in which the Boehner family grew up.
The American Dream that Boehner evokes between tears has never been more threatened. By some measures, social mobility — that is, the ability of people to move up a notch in class — is at an all-time low in this country. Poor Americans now have less than a 5 percent chance of rising to the upper-middle-class within their lifetimes.At the same time, the gap between the rich and poor, and the concentration of wealth owned by those at the very top, has never been so great. After examining these trends, The Economist wrote that “the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”
So what should Americans make of Boehner's tears? Not much, but let's not dismiss them as conscious hypocrisy, a mere political device. They have more significance as signs of self-love. About five years ago the Nuremberg report by Harvard psychologist, Henry Murray, on Hitler's psycho-pathology was finally released. The report makes for fascinating reading, revealing a man who had, alternately, great self-control and little control over his emotions. Certainly Hitler was known for his sentimentality even as he could behave with enormous cruelty.
Well, Boehner isn't exactly Hitler. He's just another politician. He's an ambitious, narcissistic, sloppy man whose tears undoubtedly contain traces of Merlot. He's someone with whom we've been a little more polite than we should have been. We should be telling him to go stuff it every time his eyes get a little shiny.
