John Boehner: I’d Rather Smoke and Drink Red Wine Than Be President

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) stopped by NBC’s The Tonight Show to chat with host and reviled coup d’état leader Jay Leno. They discussed Chris Christie, Edward Snowden, Boehner’s occasional role as House “Gestapo,” and the GOP-led government shutdown. (“So I said, ‘You wanna fight this fight, I’ll go fight the fight with you.’ But it was a very predictable disaster. And so the sooner we got it over with, the better.”)

But the most interesting quote Boehner had to offer Leno’s audience was fluffier in nature. It came when the comedian asked the politician if he had any plans to run for president. His response:

I like to play golf. I like to cut my own grass. I do drink red wine. I smoke cigarettes and I’m not giving that up to be President of the United States.

Boehner definitely enjoys his red wine and cigarettes (two things you are allowed to consume as commander in chief, but whatever). President Obama gifted Boehner a $110 bottle of Tuscan red wine for his 63rd birthday, and Boehner received positive coverage from The Daily Beast for bringing the “booze back to Washington.” Boehner is a Camel Ultra Lights smoker, and prior to the smoking ban in the Speaker’s Lobby, he took smoking breaks there so frequently that one of the benches was dubbed the “Boehner bench.”

You can watch longer clips of his Tonight Show interview here.

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We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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