WASHINGTON — House Minority Leader John Boehner continued his war of words with President Barack Obama Thursday.
“[The President and the Democrats] are in such a disarray up here that they can’t produce a budget or a troop-funding bill,” said Boehner, R-Ohio. “It’s time for them to grow up.”
Boehner and Obama have engaged in verbal attacks of each other for quite some time, with Obama even stepping into the ring himself. Shortly after Boehner compared the Wall Street reform to “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon,” Obama quickly shot back saying that the GOP leader was out of touch with the American people.
“He should come here to [Wisconsin] and ask people if they think the financial crisis was an ant,” Obama said. “He should ask the men and women who’ve been out of work for months at a time. He should ask the Americans who send me letters every night that talk about how they’re barely hanging on… The Republican leader might want to maintain a status quo on Wall Street. But we want to move America forward.”
To that, Boehner replied, “The president should be focused on solving the problems of the American people…instead of my choice of metaphors.”
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs also jumped into the fray and echoed the president: “[This] demonstrates how out of touch [Boehner is] and it demonstrates exactly the type of mindset that he would bring to leading the House of Representatives.”
That hasn’t stopped Boehner from returning those verbal attacks.
“With all the trouble that House Democrats are in right now, it was really only a matter of time before the gloves came off,” Boehner said. “I just didn’t know the targets would be each other.”
He suggested that House Democrats are in a “full-scale civil war this week” after recent comments made by Gibbs on “Meet the Press” that they are in jeopardy of losing the House this fall, especially “since they see the White House is throwing them under the bus.”
But Boehner suggested that Democrats are getting exactly what they asked for.
“Let’s not forget that House Democrats gave President Obama every dollar, every tax hike, every stimulus program, and every government takeover that he asked for,” Boehner said. “The one thing the American people asked the Democrats to do was say no, and yet they never did.”
Boehner also added that the rhetoric coming from the White House and Democrats is nothing more than just that, rhetoric.
“They’ve said, they’ve said, they’ve said. Show me the beef.”