“I think that this salon owes me an apology for setting me up,” said Nancy Pelosi last Wednesday. The story had exploded that she went out of her way to secure for herself a hairdressing service of the sort she had repeatedly told everyone else they should forgo for the duration of the pandemic, for everyone’s good, and their own.
“The b—- set me up,” was the famous phrase of Washington’s ex-mayor Marion Barry, when caught with a prostitute smoking crack. That didn’t help either.
No one “set her up,” but she sure set herself up when she conspicuously indulged in the sort of behavior she urged everyone else to abjure. Barbering, haircutting, and hairdressing services were among the first of the businesses put on hiatus, as they require their help to stand very close to the people they serve. It’s exceedingly hard to work on hair at a distance unless one has arms that reach down to one’s ankles. The laissez-faire and free enterprise-friendly Republican Party has said at times that shutting down businesses in the interest of caution causes more human pain through mass unemployment than the few cases that may result from this sort of exposure. But Pelosi’s Democrats have been unsympathetic to that perspective. If she forced this salon to open up against the wish of its owner, which seems to have happened, how did she happen to be “set up” by it? Inquiring minds want to know.
Inquiring minds might also be asking just whom this setup was designed to have helped. The only answer to this is “the Republican Party,” as no one else seems to gain from having the country’s top-ranking Democrat (if you don’t count its ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) talking and acting like someone unhinged, behaving like a “Karen,” that prototypical form of entitled white female. It’s hard to say that Pelosi helped herself either, in ranting over a setup that does sound a little incredible.
Are female hairdressers in deep-blue San Francisco somehow in league with Republican congressmen? If so, things are worse than we thought.
And this wasn’t the end of the bad news for Pelosi, who found herself sandbagged last Tuesday when her protege, Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III (of the old seat in Boston where JFK started), lost his attempt to jump to the Senate. The seat’s current occupant, Sen. Edward Markey, defeated him by 10 points.
Kennedy is the son of former Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy ll, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy. Pelosi and Joe Kennedy lll are both very good-haired children of dynasties who should think perhaps a little less about power and more of just living their lives.
