Every child faces that cruel moment they are morally obligated to take the keys from their once-cogent parent. Telling people they are well, well beyond their prime is just a part of the circle of life. It’s high time for Nancy Pelosi to get the boot.
The House Speaker’s plus-37 Democratic constituency won’t ax her in a general election, and San Francisco’s champagne socialist donor class won’t dare disrupt the petty princess of Pacific Heights. So it’s time for the Democrats dragging the dregs of the party across the finish line to put this octogenarian socialite out of her political misery.
On a conference call with her rightfully livid caucus, Rep. Abigail Spanberger rightfully tore into the party.
“No one should say ‘defund the police’ ever again. Nobody should be talking about socialism,” the centrist Virginian reportedly warned. If Democrats kept up the act in 2022, they’d “get f—ing torn apart.”
One expects Ilhan Omar and her ilk to devolve into campus clowns screaming that the protection of private property is fascism and that real socialism has never been tried before. But histrionics is what gets novelty candidates election. The pragmatic execution of an agenda is what keeps an actual leader in power.
Despite her rather cheap acquisition of her post, thanks to a father, brother, and husband all more wealthy and powerful than her, Pelosi once proved herself a mastermind in her own right. Who else could have whipped the votes to ram through a sweeping healthcare bill so overwhelmingly underwater with the public? Who else could have called Donald Trump’s disastrous government shutdown bluff to humiliating success? At the start of her second tenure as House speaker, she seemed set to stage her party for extraordinary success, yet instead, the tail wagged the dog, and Pelosi proved worse than useless.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolled out her socialist Christmas list masquerading as a “Green New Deal,” Pelosi laughed off the nonbinding resolution’s supporters as “like, five people.” But then, she let those five people run her party. They bullied House leadership into every manner of folly, at one point calling her racist and sexist. She let them dilute a resolution against Omar’s anti-Semitic hate speech into the left-wing equivalent of an All Lives Matter resolution. They launched and carried through an embarrassing joke of an impeachment inquiry into Trump and, eventually, dragging the Democrats so badly that Joe Biden’s win barely puts a smile on their supporters’ faces.
House Republicans have not covered themselves in glory, yet they’re slated to earn at least 10 seats and potentially 10 more, cutting into the majority that Democrats thought they’d expand.
And, in large part, that’s because Pelosi squandered the most powerful position a woman has ever held in the legislative branch. She appeased the racists, satisfied the socialists with her silence, and more than anything, descended to Trump’s level of petty, letting her hate and yearlong silent treatment blind her so badly that she denied a populace made hungry and despondent by fatal government lockdowns a second set of coronavirus relief aid. (And mind you, all of this is ignoring Pelosi’s personally disdainful coronavirus hypocrisies.)
That’s a moral failure. But from a purely strategic level, she let go of her party’s narrative, leaving Biden to limp over the finish line alone without coattails.
Our cartel of a gerontocracy is a national disgrace for many reasons, but at least the seemingly senile Biden can win an election against Trump. Pelosi could not, and for the sake of a functional democracy, her time must be up.
