7thriv

Yet Mr *******'s life story is the type of classic up-by-the-bootstraps tale of the American Dream that can put a tear in a voter's eye. As his story becomes better known, the Democrats could even be drawing favourable attention upon him. Right now, most Americans have never heard of Mr *******, and fewer still can pronounce his name, which rhymes with ******. The alleged elitist country club Republican is an **** Congressman who grew up in near poverty.

His sister Lynda Meineke, who is 51, is a waitress and bar tender at Andy's Cafe in Carthage, Ohio, a family business that was founded by their grandfather Andy Boehner in 1938. As a child, one of Mr *******'s jobs was to mop the floor.

Sitting outside the bar this week, sipping a bottle of Bud Light and smoking a cigarette, Mrs Meineke described her childhood as "cramped" but happy. "We learned how to share. If there was a toy, it wasn't just for you but for all the younger ones."

Mr *******, 61, is the second of 12 who grew up in a German-Irish family in Reading, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati. All but two of them still live within a few miles of each other. Two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.

The future Congressman started work as a janitor and took seven years to get his degree – the first in the family to do so – because he had several jobs to pay his way. He joined a plastics and packaging company, rising to president before entering local politics by being elected to the town board.

That is the biography of House Minority Leader, John Boehner; he of the "party of Big Business and lobbyist ties" whose tan, golfing and smoking habit - not to mention his likely ascent to the Speaker's dais - have marked him as the new conservative Darth Vadar. The profile is from the Telegraph, which is appropriate. An American media outlet would never allow the public to learn the biography of any conservative politician. Better to dehumanize them, and pretend that they are little more than corrupt pod people grown on a farm owned by the Koch brothers.

The article also notes that Boehner's prominent tan is the result, not of plutocratic sessions under a tanning bed, but genetics: Boehner's mother came from a family with a dark, olive complexion. Kinda puts President Obama's comments on the subject -"He is a person of colour, although not a colour that appears in the natural world" - into a whole new perspective, that perspective being that Obama is an a**hole.

Now, I am sure there are plenty of liberals who, in the unlikely event they were to read the Telegraph, would be incredulous that a man with Boehner's background could be a Republican. They should take a look at their own leaders sometime. Between the daughter of the mayor of Baltimore who married a wealthy financier (a limousine liberal from birth!) to the "blow jobs in the Oval Office" rock star former president to a smug lawyer who attended a racist "church" for 20 years and rewrites the Declaration of Independence to suit his own ideology, you could ask what other choice a regular guy like Boehner would have.