Robert Costa of NRO has the details*, and the short version is as follows: Americans Majority Action staffer Ron Meyer Jr. got caught up in an attempt to get rid of House Speaker John Boehner for Boehner’s refusal to play King Canute; this all went along reasonably until Meyer et al fell in with various disgruntled House Republicans with their own axes to grind; and hi-jinks, as they say, ensued. End result: John Boehner 1, Disgruntled House Republicans 1, AMA 0. Moral of the story**? You can like politicians. You can be friends with politicians. You can even have a drink with a politician. But you should never, ever, ever, ever blindly trust one when he or she tells you that of course something is going to happen. If it was certain as he or she claimed, you wouldn’t have needed to be reassured in the first place***.
Here endeth the lesson.
Moe Lane
*One note: AMA head Ned Ryun is a diarist for RedState whose posts got promoted by the site. This is a subtle difference, which is to say that I am not going to be all that exercised if people don’t really see the difference.
**I have had it pointed out to me privately that there is a second moral to this story: If you’re going to be doing skulduggery, keep your mouth shut about it. You never tell nobody anything about what you’re about to do unless they need to know about it in order for you to do it. If that’s too much risk, figure out an alternate method to do whatever it was that you’re about to do. The goal is to succeed, not to look good. You want somebody to tell you how clever you are? Go defrag your mom’s computer.
***This does not even remotely mean that when a politician or insider is telling you something that is contrary to conventional wisdom then he or she is lying, of course. A good example of this was that first FISA reauthorization fight, back in the day: it was widely assumed in public that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was going to ramrod through legislation crippling the measure, but privately it was admitted that, no, she wasn’t. The thing there, though? There was evidence supporting those private assurances – specifically, the fact that acceptable-to-Republicans legislation had made it past the Rules Committee for a floor vote. Or: as usual, Reagan had it right. Trust, but verify.