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| Pauly Shore on the verge of cracking into the Hollywood A-list in the early-1990s (courtesy of Rolling Stone) |
Imagine being Pauly Shore’s agent in the gloriously strange
year of 1993. VHS copies of Son in Law
and Encino Man are in and out of Blockbuster stores all over the country. People are (unsuccessfully) comparing him to
Robin Williams and Bill Murray. The
production for In the Army Now is just ramping up – and everyone says it’s
going to be another hit for Shore and company. You’ve been around Hollywood for a long time
already and you have to admit that Pauly is having a nice a little run, yet something
just doesn’t feel quite right. But when you
suggest that, perhaps, he needs to read the scripts before signing onto
projects like Bio-Dome or Jury Duty, he just lights up a J and tells you that
you need to believe in his talents a little more. That you should have a little faith. You go over and over how you’re going to get
yourself out of this, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy answer. How are you going to tell him that it’s all
going to lead to Casper sequels and Nash Bridges cameos? That one day “Pauly Shore is Dead” will be one
of the top five Pauly Shore-related google searches? The only play: you don’t. You pretend like it's all just some amusing daydream for as long as you can handle it, then promptly resign.
John Boehner essentially lived with this scenario on a daily
basis since he took the gavel in the Tea Party’s successful bid for
congressional power in 2011. Here was a
born and bred conservative, the very emblem of the “up by your bootstraps” hero
that the entire conservative movement has been obsessed with since the Don
Draper era. He put himself through
college with multiple jobs, worked his way up to CEO of a company, then
rocketed through congress to become the Speaker of the House, winning 13
different elections along the way in the key swing state of Ohio. But once he reached one of the highest ranks
in the U.S. Government, he was essentially treated like a nun at a rave party,
clashing with a group of upstarts just elected because they successfully wooed the
“Earth is 6,000 years old” constituents from the Bible Belt. Despite very strong conservative credentials
of his own and nearly a quarter-century in congress, he was told to sit in
the corner and think about what he’s done, namely being open to the idea of
making decisions based on the reality of running the House. Whenever he needed to really get anything done,
to avoid one embarrassment or another, he would have to run to Nancy Pelosi to get
Democratic votes – all while his own base performed séances to resurrect the
ghosts of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. Boehner did things like work with Dems to fund
the Hurricane Sandy bill and negotiate bipartisan deals on Medicare. This was, of course, his biggest political sin to a group that believes a government shutdown is a better alternative than having a cup of coffee with a Democratic leader. He even stayed sober enough to deal with the radicals
in his own party who constantly dogged him to their hardened constituents who consider themselves the “true conservatives." The same radicals
who did things like vote against his own Homeland Security funding bill just
for shits and giggles.
