{"id":1937,"date":"2018-04-13T14:48:47","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T10:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=1937"},"modified":"2018-04-13T14:48:47","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T10:48:47","slug":"can-we-at-least-get-some-new-excuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=1937","title":{"rendered":"Can we at least get some new excuses?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is leaving Congress so he can &#8220;spend more time with his family.&#8221; Oh give me a break. You&#8217;ve got a team of speechwriters and this is the best you can come up with? &#8220;Spending more time with my family&#8221; is the oldest line in the book. It&#8217;s more like how one would &#8220;retire&#8221; from Congress on <em>Saturday Night Live<\/em>, or perhaps a Mel Brooks movie.<\/p>\n<p>Many years ago the late Joe Sullivan said he wanted to do a study of the real reason every time a politician said he was leaving office to &#8220;spend more time with his family.&#8221; He and I discussed this in about 2005. I said 100% of the time the real answer is&#8230; I thought I was going to lose.<\/p>\n<p>I stand by my answer.<\/p>\n<p>(By the way, this whole exchange is included in the &#8220;monologue&#8221; track on\u00a0<em>Live &#8216;n On Q<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p>Now if you&#8217;ll excuse me I&#8217;m going to go spend some time with my family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is leaving Congress so he can &#8220;spend more time with his family.&#8221; Oh give me a break. You&#8217;ve got a team of speechwriters and this is the best you can come up with? &#8220;Spending &hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=1937\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1937"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1939,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937\/revisions\/1939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}