Ep. 4 dissects John Boehner’s resignation as a clash between pragmatism and Tea Party extremism, comparing conservative infighting to abused children blaming siblings—highlighting how figures like Mark Levin demonized him for failing their unrealistic demands (e.g., defunding Planned Parenthood). The speaker contrasts Boehner’s post-Obama election despair over GOP compromise with the left’s unchecked ideological shifts, framing his downfall as a casualty of shifting political eras. Satirical tangents—from "#ShoutYourMurderedWife" to blood moon dragons—underscore the episode’s chaotic, provocative tone, ending with a twisty thriller recommendation. [Automatically generated summary]
By now, everyone has heard about the shout your abortion hashtag on Twitter.
Women who have had abortions are encouraged to tweet about why they're proud and happy to have done so, how it set them free for a life and career they would not have been able to have had they allowed their babies to, you know, live.
These women argue that a woman's right to decide what happens to her body is unconditional, and a baby doesn't have a right to take over that body for nine months.
Some babies argued that they too had a right to decide what happened to their bodies.
Or they would have argued that, but, you know, stuff happens.
Now, I personally was deeply inspired by the outspoken courage of the shout your abortion women.
There was none of this being silenced by guilt over doing something that happens to be wrong, just an unbridled celebration of the blood-soaked freedom that one can achieve if one simply embraces the concept that other people's lives aren't as sacred as your own.
That's why I've started my own hashtag, shout your murdered wife, to celebrate the two wives I got rid of in order to find happiness.
Actually, it's three wives if you count the third one I killed.
Killing my wives was the best decision I ever made.
After all, like the shout your abortion women, I hadn't done anything to cause myself to be burdened with another person, or if I had, I was drunk out of my mind at the time and can't remember.
My body is my own, and I shouldn't have to share it with someone else for the rest of my life just because I made a mistake and got married.
Suddenly, I wake up to find there's someone else draining my resources, making me nauseous, putting demands on my time and energy, and forcing me to watch movies in which men apologize to Reese Witherspoon for some reason.
I'm not going to go around skulking in the shadows or dropping my voice simply because I decided to end my marriage with a claimmer.
I think these decisions should be strictly between a woman and her doctor.
And I am a doctor, so I made the decision along with my wife.
Although she disagreed.
And I'm not really a doctor.
Psychology Of The Boehner Fight00:16:00
But the point remains the same.
Killing my wives was not just good for me, it was good for my family as well.
Now I can afford to go on vacations and send my kids to good schools, if I ever have kids.
You know, when I started Shout Your Murdered Wife, there were a lot of women who said some very cruel and nasty things about my personal decisions.
But why should women have a say in the decisions of men?
They've never had wives.
They don't know how annoying it is.
So they should keep their sexist opinions to themselves, or else I'll marry them next.
So join me at hashtag shout your murdered wife and tweet to all the world.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right, we're back, and it's Monday, and we have survived the blood moon apocalypse.
Hooray!
Did everybody see this?
I actually saw this.
It was cloudy in my neighborhood.
Yeah, yeah, it was cloudy.
But toward the end, it came up.
I saw like the second half of it, and it was, you know, it was supposed to herald the end of the world.
Why are people always telling you when the end of the world is coming?
What are you supposed to do about it?
I mean, in this case, of course, we know that the blood moon apocalypse was caused by global warming.
You use oil and the oceans warm up and then that breeds dragons and they come and devour the moon and it goes out.
So we survived and we're here again.
And this is yet another truncated, shortened version of the Andrew Clavin Show.
We're still operating.
We're not filming in our studio yet.
We're filming in an overturned tractor trailer off Fury Road.
If you listen carefully, you'll hear Mad Max going one way and then the other way.
That's the entire plot of that movie.
So listen closely and you will be hearing that.
But soon we're going to have our new studio, which is going to be immense.
We're going to have a full orchestra, I think, and we'll do Air Force flyovers.
People will parachute out of F-16s wearing nothing but body paint and then will put their bodies together to form an American flag.
It's going to be kind of sexy, actually.
Jonathan Hay, our cameraman, is going, are we really going to do that?
No, we're not really doing that.
I'm just making it up.
All right, this is a conservative show about the culture, which means we don't get into the highweeds about politics.
We take a look at what's going on from a conservative point of view.
By the culture, I mean how we live, how we relate to one another, how we think, and also the arts that reflect all those things.
And today, I'm going to talk about a political event.
I'm going to talk about the resignation of John Boehner, but not to talk about who's coming next or what the leadership fight is going to be like.
I just want to talk about something that I've really noticed about the way we all think on the right and on the left.
And on the right, we kind of defend it when we do it, but when we see the left doing it, we realize that there's a certain amount of irrational thinking behind it.
I'm going to talk about the psychology of our fight with John Boehner, because I'm part of this fight.
I'm on the right of John Boehner, and I didn't like the job he was doing.
But I think there's something irrational going on.
The point of psychology, Freud said that the point of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious.
And the reason you do that is if something is in the dark, it has power over you.
If you bring it into the light, you're still going to have the same psychology, but at least you'll be able to control it.
You'll have power over it.
So what we saw was this horrible fight where we on the right were just hammering Boehner and Boehner was kind of yelling back at us.
Let me tell you my one, I have one John Boehner story.
And it's worth telling.
We were talking last week about how stories are not just about the individuals involved.
They represent a wider point.
And I tell this story because it actually does represent, it's an amazingly predictive story.
It kind of predicted what was going to happen with John Boehner and the right.
Back just after Obama took office, so I think Boehner was still the minority leader then.
I gave, the Tea Party rose up and I gave a speech to a very early gathering of the Tea Party in Santa Barbara.
So I didn't really know.
I'd been following the news.
I knew what the Tea Party was, but I hadn't met anybody.
And this was the first time I went to a gathering and I met all these Tea Party people, ordinary people from north of Santa Barbara, where you sort of leave the city, leave the kind of coastal elite types, and you get more into the country folks.
And they had come down to see this.
And I gave a very brief speech, kind of one of my satirical diatribes.
And I was, after it was over, I was floating on air.
I thought these were the best people I had ever met.
And the fact that they had risen up, they'd gotten so angry at Obama and had risen up to take some political action thrilled me.
I just thought, we're saved.
We're saved.
The cavalry has arrived.
The American people are back.
We're not going to let this happen.
It's going to be okay.
It's not just people like me sitting around sipping Chardonnay and saying, you know, we're really supposed to get rid of this Obama fellow.
It was real people coming out to protest.
I'm driving home and I'm in heaven.
I'm in bliss, cloud of bliss.
And my phone rings in my car and it's a friend of mine who was a big Republican fundraiser up in Santa Barbara.
And she says to me, Boehner's at my house.
Come over and meet him.
So I said, sure, that sounded exciting.
He's still a minority leader, but still an important character.
And so I drive over and it's a party.
When she said Boehner was at her house, that was it.
It was Boehner and one other congressman and maybe two other people.
So it was a very intimate gathering and this is a lovely house with a bar and I'm standing at the bar with John Boehner and we're talking like this.
By the time I walked out of this party, I am suicidally depressed.
I looked at this guy and I thought, we're screwed.
And never mind the Tea Party.
No number of Tea Party people are going to be able to counteract this guy sitting around with the orange face and the booze and the cigarette.
I'm just a little man and a big job.
And I thought, oh, Lord.
And I wrote to a friend of mine who's an old political observer and one of the wisest political observers I know, and I said, oh man, I met Boehner and he is, and I said this with great disdain, he is an institutional man.
And by that I meant a guy who goes with the institution, goes with traditions, compromises, deals, backroom deals.
I said, he is an institutional man.
And my friend wrote me back, and like I said, he's a very wise old political man.
He said, yes, but just remember, Congress is an institution.
And I thought that kind of defined what happened to Boehner.
To be fair to Boehner, it's easy for people like us who aren't in an institution to sit there and say, why don't you do this?
Why don't you do that?
And I can see how frustrating that was for Boehner.
Boehner did some good things.
He cut spending.
He really did.
I mean, through the sequester, he outsmarted Obama, but he also did not know what he was up against.
So we have a cut of Boehner, right, from, I think it's from Meet the Press.
He's talking to John Dickerson.
It's face the nation, thank you.
John Dickerson, to me, one of the most slanted reporters on TV.
He gives these softball questions to Hillary Clinton.
And he's just, you can just see he's delighted that there's some dysfunction in the Republican Party.
But listen to Boehner's frustration.
They wanted this long, slow process.
And so change comes slowly, and obviously too slowly for some.
Well, are they unrealistic about what can be done in government?
That's the discussion.
Absolutely.
They're unrealistic.
But, you know, the Bible says beware of false prophets.
And there are people out there, you know, spreading noise about how much can get done.
I mean, this whole idea that we're going to shut down the government to get rid of Obamacare in 2013, this plan never had a chance.
But over the course of the August recess in 2013 and the course of September, you know, a lot of my Republican colleagues who knew it was a fool's errand, really, they were getting all this pressure from home to do this.
And so we got groups here in town, members of the House and Senate here in town, who whip people into a frenzy, believing that they can accomplish things that they know, they know, are never going to happen.
Okay, that's the disagreement we are having.
That's the real disagreement we're having with John Boehner.
We want, there's this upcoming thing about defunding Planned Parenthood.
We've seen these satanic tapes, and they are satanic.
We want him.
We think he should stand up to Obama and the left, and even if it means shut down the government, defund Planned Parenthood.
And we're really frustrated that he won't do that.
What he is saying, Boehner is a devout Catholic.
He is as anti-abortion as you can get.
Nobody is saying that he is pro-abortion.
What he says is, if we do this, we're going to lose.
He knows that the press is going to blame the right for the shutdown.
And he saw the polls in 2013 when the government shut down and they all said, oh, we blame the Republicans.
He says, it can't be done.
We say, okay, but after those polls, we had a midterm election and we just kicked everybody out.
So that shutdown actually helped us.
That's the argument.
The argument is over strategy.
Now, listen to the way we treat him, okay?
That's his frustration with us.
Now, listen to the way we treat him.
Here's some stuff I just plucked off the internet.
Here's a conservative website.
I won't name it because I'm not fighting with them.
I just want to show you the tone, the tone of voice.
House Speaker John Boehner is a traitor to the U.S. Constitution and the American people.
By agreeing to fund Obamacare as well as President Obama's executive amnesty for illegal immigrants, and by shamefully attacking his Tea Party Republican colleagues, Speaker Boehner has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has abandoned all pretense of being a Tea Party leader and that he is now simply part of the corrupt Washington, D.C. political establishment.
Here's another tweet from a radio host.
Boehner is worse than Obama.
We knew who Obama was.
Boehner betrayed us all.
So I saw that.
I thought orange is the new barak.
I'm sorry.
I'll play one more cut.
Let's play the Mark Levin cut.
And of course, this is Levin's style.
I mean, I read his books and I love his books.
I can't listen to him on the radio because I'm afraid he'll give me a heart attack.
That's right, Mark.
Just listen to him talking about Boehner.
Look what's happened since you've been speaker.
Three trillion dollars in new debt.
It's the best we can do, he says.
Look what you've done.
Funding Obamacare.
Funding Dodd-Frank.
You're frustrated, all right.
You're frustrated with yourself.
And so what have you done?
You're going to declare war on us?
Oh, I'm so scared.
John Boehner has declared war on us.
And what are you going to do about it, John?
What are you going to do?
All right.
So that's the tone of this conversation.
I just want to point out that on the other side of this is Barack Obama, a man who is trying to force the little sisters of the poor to fund abortions.
He's trying to force Catholic.
I mean, think about that for a minute.
Oh, please, please, Mr. Obama.
We're the little sisters of the poor.
Don't make us kill the babies.
No, I am Obama.
You must kill the babies.
No, please, we're the little, we just want to help the poor.
No, you must also kill the babies.
I am Obama.
That's who we're up against.
That's the bad guy.
And I think that when what is happening is a psychological principle that you see in kids who, for instance, have been abused.
Say they've been abused by their father.
They hold a lifelong anger against their moms because their moms didn't stop them.
If you have a brother, an older brother, and you get bullied and you get beaten up and your older brother is too scared to come to your defense, it's your older brother you're angry with.
Okay?
We're angry at the people whom we expect something of.
We get angrier at people if we share their values.
We know, this guy who tweeted it, you know, we knew what Obama was.
And so we're angry at Boehner because he's supposed to be one of us.
All we're arguing about with Boehner's tactics, really, he's an old-fashioned guy who got caught in a moment of transition when an ideologue, a man who can't be trusted, Obama, who makes deals and then changes them at the last minute, changed the rules of the game.
He changed the rules of the negotiations.
And Boehner was not keeping up with that.
And when Boehner went to the press, of course, he didn't realize that the press hates him.
They hate us.
The press is never going to let him get that message out.
Mark Levin keeps saying, tell the people this, tell them, you can't tell the people this.
They have got a wall of silence up between you and the people.
Some of the right-wing media breaks through, but it only breaks through to our own guys.
We can see it when the left does this.
They do it all the time.
They get angrier at the people that they share values with, or that we share values with, than they do against the enemy.
They do it in Israel, where they say, you know, oh, the Israelis are terrible.
They did this horrible thing to this Palestinian kid without mentioning the fact that every country in this huge place that is the size of America surrounding this little sliver of land is oppressing everybody, oppressing every female, oppressing everybody who disagrees with them in any way.
They hold Israel to the standard because Israel is a good country.
And they use that.
When you take this process out of context, you see how mad it becomes.
I mean, this is like the Howard Zinn book that blames America for everything because America is better.
America is a better country.
Let me just read a thing I found in G.K. Chesterton, the great Catholic apologist who affected C.S. Lewis in his conversion.
He wrote in this book, The Everlasting Man, just to show you that this has been going on, because this has been written in the 19th century.
Chesterton said, there has been a queer habit among the English of always siding against the Europeans and representing the rival civilization as sinless.
When its sins were obviously crying or rather screaming to heaven.
He then talks about Carthage and he says, now it's right to rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards and ideals.
But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the other races and religions that professed the very opposite standards and ideals.
There is a very real sense in which the Christian is worse than the heathen, but there is only one sense in which he is worse, and that is not in being positively worse, the Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better.
We're angry at John Boehner because it was his business to be better.
It was his business to represent the things that we know to be right and true against a guy who is really a bad guy, an unconstitutional guy.
And my only take on Boehner is we should oppose him.
I think he wasn't bold enough.
I think he wasn't strong enough.
I don't think he understood the new rules of the game.
But we shouldn't hate on him.
We shouldn't let our disagreements become that kind of vile, angry, violent, hateful thing that I have been seeing on the right.
Because remember, Boehner is one of us.
He did what he thought was right.
He was an institutional man in an institution, and he tried to work that institution for the best.
I think we can do better.
I hope we can do better.
But we may find out that he was right and we were wrong, and we should remember that, that all he was, it was not on principle that we were fighting him.
We are fighting Obama on principle.
And we should keep that sense of anger honed against this unconstitutional guy and this immoral guy who really, as I say, is trying to force people to defy their own consciences to fund abortions.
I like to end these shows with something called Stuff I Like, in which I talk about works of art or culture that I like, but I think I'm kind of out of time.
No, all right, I'll keep talking.
I won't keep talking in that case.
Then let me talk about this.
Stuff I Like00:03:09
You know, when I look at these things, I'm looking for anything, books, video games, movies, music.
And I'm looking for stuff that I think you'll actually, that you'll actually like, that you might not have heard of.
There's no point in my recommending Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, because if you're going to read that, you've already read it or you're looking forward to reading.
You don't need me to tell you that.
But I want to find stuff that maybe got lost in the shuffle.
So some of it's going to be new, some of it's going to be old, some of it's going to be centuries old.
This is by a guy named Ira Levin, whose name has kind of slipped out of notice, but you all know who he is because he wrote the novel Rosemary's Baby and he wrote the novel, what's the, oh, The Stepford Wives.
He actually added the Stepford Wives to our vocabulary.
He wrote very little, very few things, and many of them have been forgotten.
The stuff, like we remember The Boys from Brazil, which was not one of his best books, but we remember that because it was made into a big movie.
Some of the stuff has gotten lost because it wasn't made into a movie.
He wrote a wonderful play called Dr. Cook's Garden, which was made into a TV film with Bing Crosby many, many decades ago that nobody has seen and nobody remembers.
He wrote a play called Death Trap, which was made into a really bad movie with Christopher Reeve.
It's a great play.
I saw it on stage, and it is one of the great mystery plays with Sleuth.
It's one of the great mystery plays of all time.
His first novel, for which he won an Edgar Award, my fellow Edgar Award, my fellow dual Edgar, we've both won two Edgar Awards.
It was his first book.
It was called A Kiss Before Dying.
I read this book when I was coming up, and I was a starving writer, and I had to take a job as a security guard.
And my job was to stand for eight hours in an absolutely empty atrium, signing people in when they were to caves the weekend, and they would occasionally walk in, and I'd sign them in, and that was it.
So I always had a book with me and I usually would bring these massive books.
I would just read, you know, the Count of Monte Cristo, whatever I could read to just keep myself going.
One day I made the mistake of bringing in A Kiss Before Dying and I read it in an hour.
I couldn't stop and I kept thinking, oh no, I'm getting to the end.
I'll have nothing to read.
I could not stop.
It is one of the best thrillers and just to make sure I wasn't recommending something that had dated, I went back and reread it over the weekend.
It holds up amazingly.
It can't be made into a movie.
They made it into a movie with Robert Wagner, which is awful.
It can't be made into a movie because it depends on the novel form to use its tricks.
It's insanely suspenseful.
It's insanely clever.
And if you can figure out why the girl uses another girl's belt before the detective figures it out, good on you, because I thought it was one of the most brilliant twists ever.
It's got a twist in it that because I work in this profession, because I do this for a living, I see almost every twist coming down the pike almost before the writer thinks about it.
This has got twists in it you'll never see coming.
It's a great book, A Kiss Before Dying.
I think you'll love it.
That's it.
We're not here tomorrow.
We will be back on Wednesday.
I hope one day this week I'd just like to talk about the movies.
I've done nothing but watch movies, catch up on the movies because I was away and I caught up on all the movies I had from my Netflix queue and actually went to see the movie.