Politics & Power Quote by John Boehner

Boehner’s line is a two-part maneuver: a moral scold wrapped around a strategic rescue mission. He opens with a familiar ethic - don’t pile on the wounded - which quietly reframes criticism of George W. Bush as not merely partisan, but ungenerous. That’s the intent: shift the conversation from what Bush has done to how others are behaving. If you’re attacking now, the implication goes, you’re the kind of person who kicks.

Then he widens the frame with a bold comparison: Bush facing “more difficult issues than any president since Franklin Roosevelt.” It’s a deliberate inflation, less a historical claim than a rhetorical airlift. FDR is the gold-standard of crisis leadership; invoking him doesn’t just elevate Bush, it suggests the country is living through an era of equivalent peril. That matters because it makes dissent feel smaller, even irresponsible, in the shadow of emergency.

The subtext is party discipline. “I’ve told my colleagues” isn’t about personal conviction; it’s caucus management. Boehner is signaling that Republican unity is fraying and needs to be enforced, publicly and performatively. “Stand up for the president” reads like a call to stop triangulating, stop distancing, stop saving your own skin.

Context does the rest. This is the late-Bush moment when Iraq, Katrina, and a collapsing public trust left the GOP tempted to treat Bush as political ballast. Boehner’s rhetoric tries to convert a liability into a test of character: loyalty as patriotism, criticism as cheap sport.