On the rare occasion that a member of the press actually asks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to defend her terrible decisions and leadership, she bombs magnificently in a fashion not unlike President Trump at a two-hour news conference.
Yet she is continually given a pass by a news media that is more than willing to look the other way.
On Sunday, for example, Fox News’s Chris Wallace pressed the speaker to reconcile her claim that the Trump administration’s sluggish response to the coronavirus pandemic cost thousands of deaths with the fact that she was encouraging people as late as Feb. 24 to go out and visit San Francisco’s Chinatown district.
Hilariously, Pelosi claims her downplaying of the virus in late February actually helped prevent its spread. Good luck figuring that one out.
“If the president underplayed the threat in the early days, Speaker Pelosi, didn’t you as well?” Wallace asked.
“No,” the congresswoman responded. “What we were trying to do is end the discrimination, the stigma that was going out against the Asian American community. And in fact, if you will look, the record will show that our Chinatown has been a model of containing and preventing the virus.”
Pelosi continued, explaining her “confidence” in Chinatown was the reason for her February in-person visit, saying it was meant to “offset some of the things that the president and others were saying about Asian Americans and making them a target.”
“Forgive me,” the Fox News anchor interjected. “Don’t you think that when you’re out walking without any masks — I understand this is February, not April, when this happened — and saying that there’s no threat [and] it’s perfectly safe there, weren’t you also adding to this perception that there wasn’t such a threat generally?”
Pelosi answered, “No, I was saying that you should not discriminate against Chinese Americans as some in our administration were doing.”
The speaker visited San Francisco’s Chinatown district on Feb. 24 specifically to stand in solidarity against racial discrimination against Asian Americans.
“We think it’s very safe to be in Chinatown and hope that others will come,” Pelosi said during her visit.
I am not sure which is worse: Her hypocritical attacks on the White House or her attempts to defend her hypocrisy. What Pelosi told Wallace is downright laughable. It is every bit as absurd as the sort of stuff you hear come out of the president’s mouth during his White House press briefings. Yet only one of them is made to answer for their nonsense.
Trump, of course, is mocked as an ignoramus and a know-nothing. Pelosi, on the other hand, is praised by the press regardless of what she does or says as a shrewd player. She is a “troublemaker with a gavel,” the subject of cloying “you go girls” and no small amount of Beatlemania-esque news coverage. All this despite her track record of general incompetence, including her botched impeachment ploy and her failed attempt to shoehorn left-wing goodies into Congress’s $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package.
Had Pelosi an “R” next to her name, you would no doubt hear about her shameful Wallace interview nonstop for the next few weeks from a shocked — shocked! — news media.
But Pelosi said it, she is a Democratic lawmaker, and her gibberish defense came in response to a question from a Fox News anchor. So, you likely will hear about the interview only in right-leaning circles, which is sort of funny considering how many national reporters watch Fox News looking for things about which they can be angry.
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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that Pelosi visited Chinatown to protest the White House’s travel ban on China. We regret the error.
