Critics Poke at Boehner's Blubbing

John Boehner is known for getting emotional, and last night was no exception: He choked up during his speech acknowledging that he will soon become speaker of the House (watch it in the gallery). Analysis of the waterworks swiftly followed:

• The MSNBC election team mocked Boehner’s “weeping” in “a most petty manner,” writes Colby Hall on Mediaite. Keith Olbermann noted that Boehner “will cry at a super market opening,” but Lawrence O’Donnell defended the speaker and called his tears “genuine.”
• Jake Tapper tweeted, “Get used to those tears, folks. He's a cryer,” New York notes.

• Also on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow criticized Boehner for weeping “openly and almost like ferociously on the floor of the House while begging Republicans to vote for TARP, to vote for the bailout,” then turning around and “demonizing what he begged people to vote for … he is a weeper.”
• Over in the UK, however, Andrew M. Brown thinks Boehner will be forgiven for his display of emotion: He was talking about the American dream, after all, and that’s “an elemental, almost sacred ideal to many Americans,” he writes in the Telegraph—while noting that, if Boehner were British, “we might think it a trifle wet, or wonder if he was suffering a nervous breakdown.”

For more on Boehner and what he’s facing now that he's the next speaker, click here. (More John Boehner stories.)