Boehner Says the Serenity Prayer?

GOP Speaker of the House John Boehner is known around the capital as a guy who likes his cocktails. Also an inveterate smoker (he's a Camel Ultra Lights man), the former Ohio businessman even started pulling shifts at the bar his family owned when he was just eight years old. (Does that sound like the start of a great 12-step "qualification," or what?) So all that might lead one to be surprised when last night, while announcing that he would withdraw, for lack of support, his so-called "Plan B" to avert the coming "fiscal cliff," Boehner invoked the Serenity Prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” Who would ever have believed the Speaker would admit—in public, no less—his own powerlessness? But before anyone jumps to conclusions and decides that this means John B. has jumped on the water wagon, it's worth noting that, as The Fix previously reported, the Serenity Prayer has not always been exclusively associated with Alcoholics Anonymous; in fact, it was originally written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1943, as a way of grappling with his and other German emigres' powerlessness in the face of the Nazi menace.