- Sen.
Ted Cruz derided political criticism fromJohn Boehner as "drunken, bloviated scorn." - Boehner slammed Cruz as a "jerk" who likes to "draw a lot of attention" to himself.
- In February, Boehner went off-script in an audiobook recording, telling Cruz to "go f--- yourself."
GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas on Friday tore into former US House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, labeling criticism from one of the party's most prominent Republicans as "drunken, bloviated scorn."
In an interview that will air on "CBS Sunday Morning" this weekend, Boehner, who's promoting his new memoir, "On the House: A Washington Memoir," lashed into Cruz, describing him as an attention seeker.
"I don't beat anybody up - it's not really my style, except for that jerk," he said. "Perfect symbol, you know, of getting elected, making a lot of noise, draw a lot of attention to yourself, raise a lot of money, which means you're gonna go make more noise, raise more money - it's really unfortunate."
Cruz was ready with a comeback, slamming Boehner as part of the Washington DC political "swamp," while mocking the former speaker's penchant for showing emotion in public.
"The Swamp is unhappy," he tweeted on Friday. "I wear with pride his drunken, bloviated scorn. Please don't cry."
-Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 9, 2021
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In February, Cruz hit back at Boehner at the the Conservative Political Action Conference after Axios reported that the former speaker told Cruz to "go f--- yourself" after veering off-script from his memoir's audiobook recording.
"You know yesterday, John Boehner made some news," Cruz said at the time. "He suggested that I do something that is anatomically impossible. To which my response was: Who's John Boehner?"
Around that time, Boehner tweeted an image of himself with a glass of wine while recording his audiobook.
"Poured myself a glass of something nice to read my audiobook," he wrote. "You can blame the wine for the expletives."
Boehner, who served in the House from 1991 to 2015 and was its speaker from 2011 to 2015, described leading the lower chamber during former President Barack Obama's tenure as becoming the "mayor" of "Crazytown."
"Crazytown was populated by jackasses, and media hounds, and some normal citizens as baffled as I was about how we got trapped inside the city walls," Boehner wrote in his memoir. "Every second of every day since Barack Obama became president I was fighting one bats--- idea after another."
Boehner's book will be released on April 13.