This must be very frustrating for Reid, but it’s the sort of thing that happens so often that he must think of it as normal life. Boehner, the House Republican leader, seems to be in a more pathetic state, which began with an interview he did with The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. This is the paper owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, the wealthy patron of right-wing causes, but all I can say is, you go, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Image Gail Collins Credit... Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Boehner dismissed the financial reform package as “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” Once again, Democrats did the happy dance.

“That’s right,” said President Obama at his town-hall meeting on the economy in Wisconsin. “He compared the financial crisis to an ant. The same financial crisis that led to the loss of nearly eight million jobs.”

It really was a ridiculous metaphor. The financial reform package is actually more like killing a mastodon with a small spear. Could work, but not the sort of weapon you’d want to count on for every occasion.

Boehner also called for means-testing Social Security so that retirees with “substantial non-Social Security income” don’t get payments. This should be popular with upper-middle-class Republican voters, whose great complaint has always been that the government insists on giving them too much money.

Perhaps most interesting was his attack on the Obama administration’s attempts to impose a moratorium on deep-sea drilling. “The deep-water drilling  maybe there’s a reason there to pause till we know what happened and we can make sure we can prevent it from happening again,” Boehner said. “But all of this other drilling that’s going on down there in the more shallow waters  there’s no reason to have a moratorium.”

This is actually a perfect description of the Obama policy. It was as if Boehner had denounced the health care reform law by saying that it would probably be a good idea to require people to have insurance and subsidize it for the poor, but that there was absolutely no reason to nationalize all the hospitals and have them run by the Army. Boehner looked burned-out in the interview, like a sullen college student sitting through a boring seminar. A very tanned, puffy-eyed, 60-year-old college student.