House Speaker John Boehner went on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night and blamed Republicans for shutting down the government last year.

Although Senate Republicans like Ted Cruz continue to insist that the government shutdown was the fault of President Obama, Speaker Boehner frankly admitted that the gambit was undertaken by members of his own party.

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“I told my colleagues in July that I don’t think shutting down the government over Obamacare was going to work, because the president ‘I’m not going to negotiate.’ So I told them in August, ‘Probably not a good idea.’ Told ’em in early September.”

“But when I looked up,” he told Leno, “I saw my colleagues going this way. And you learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk. So I said, ‘You want to fight this fight? I’ll go fight the fight with you.’ But it was a very predictable disaster.”

“So the sooner we got it over with the better. We were fighting for the right thing, but I just thought tactfully it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

“Some members,” he continued, “I have to be the big brother figure. Some, I have to be the father figure. Others, I have to be the dean of students or the principal. Some of them, I have to be the Gestapo.”

“There’s nothing I could do that was ever conservative enough for them.”

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Watch the entire segment from NBC’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno below.

[Image via AFP]