REPUBLICAN HOUSE minority leader John Boehner has picked a fight with the wrong family.
In speeches, Boehner recently has been invoking the name of deceased country singer Johnny Cash--who famously stood up for the poor and oppressed--to push for a vote for the Republicans.
According to Boehner, "Remember when Ronald Reagan was president? We had Bob Hope. We had Johnny Cash. Think about where we are today. We have got President Obama. But we have no hope and we have no cash."
Funny. Republicans like to forget that Johnny Cash was a defender of social programs like welfare, and an opponent of the prison system, the death penalty and the war in Iraq. He was also a supporter of Democrat Jimmy Carter (a distant cousin of his wife June Carter).
In fact, after growing up in Dyess, Ark.--a 16,000-acre New Deal project run by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration--Cash would joke that "I grew up under socialism--kind of. Maybe a better word would be communalism."
As Gawker.com's Max Read noted, Boehner's "joke"
...is a very stupid line, even by stump-speech standards, but it's pretty successful at ignoring any kind of socio-historico-cultural accuracy (I mean, Johnny Cash, a Reagan-era cultural touchstone?) in favor of connecting three vaguely iconic Americans in some kind of nostalgia wonderland as though they really had anything to do with each other, like the rhetorical equivalent of those airbrushed T-shirts where Kurt Cobain is jamming out with Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis is there or something.
Republicans, of course, have been trying to lay claim to Cash's legacy for years. In 2004, less than a year after his death, the Republican Party decided to host a special event at the Republican National Convention. At a special "reception" sponsored by the American Gas Association, Republican delegates from Tennessee were invited to "celebrate" both Johnny Cash and Republican Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander at Sotheby's, the exclusive New York auction house where a sale of some of Cash's possessions was to take place.
Cash's family distanced themselves from the Republican Party then, and hundreds of black-clad Cash fans showed up as part of a "Man and Woman in Black Bloc" protest to tell the Republicans to keep their hands off the legacy of the man who famously sang that "I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, / Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town, / I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, / But is there because he's a victim of the times."
But Republicans like Boehner never learn their lesson--and now, Johnny's famously outspoken daughter Rosanne, a tremendous singer in her own right, has a special message for John Boehner.
In a message sent out via Twitter on November 2, Rosanne stated simply: "John Boehner: Stop using my dad's name as a punchline, you asshat."
