Cream & Sugar, Not Pork

Those with a political memory extending past the Presidency of the great and powerful wizard of Hope, aka Barack Obama, will no doubt remember that Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, was roundly mocked at every turn for making embarrassing verbal gaffes, known to a large segment of the public as “Bushisms.” Naturally, the implication was that any political leader who said things half as foolish as these so-called “Bushisms” was obviously unfit for public office, given their inability to maintain political credibility. 

If this is so, then this author is incredibly puzzled at the fact that no similar collection of “Pelosisms”  has emerged, as it seems that for nearly every Bush-era gaffe, there is a perfect mirror image in Nancy Pelosi’s vocabulary. Where Bush was famous for “putting food on [our] children,” Pelosi is famous for putting debt on our children. Where Bush was famous for not understanding how to pronounce “nuclear,” Pelosi is incapable of understanding that it’s the wrong time for a nuclear option on health care. But perhaps the worst gaffe of all that Pelosi could have ever made came just this past week when she made a truly half-hearted and shamelessly cynical attempt to co-opt everything that stands against her depraved political philosophy.

The Politico reports:

“’We share some of the views of the tea partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C.," Pelosi said in a taped interview airing Sunday on ABC's ‘This Week.’ ‘It just has to stop. And that's why I've fought the special interest, whether it's on energy, whether it's on health insurance, whether it's on pharmaceuticals and the rest.’”

Yes, you read right. Nancy Pelosi apparently believes that the Tea Party movement actually leans towards her ideas. To anyone with even the faintest sense of political sanity, this is comparable to King George concluding that the colonists at the original Boston Tea Party were upset because they were being asked to pay too little for their tea! Still, sheer incredulity alone cannot refute Pelosi’s admittedly bizarre idea, and so it behooves us to actually examine her reasoning and to ask the questions which so many of the mainstream media seem either unable or unwilling to ask.

Firstly, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Nancy Pelosi actually believes she is on the same side as the Tea Party movement with respect to “special interests.”  Presumably, given her rhetoric, and certainly given that employed by the Tea Party Movement, this stance is a stance of opposition. Yet where was this famed opposition to special interests when Pelosi exempted local tuna companies from her minimum wage bill at the same time she pushed for it to kill jobs everywhere else? Where was this opposition to special interests at the point where her list of top donors reads like a who’s who of the Wall Street and labor establishments? Where is this opposition to special interests now that she is currently engaged in pushing a Senate bill which delivers the American people on a silver platter as a giant captive market to the very same industries she proposed to reign in? 

But more nauseatingly still, Ms. Pelosi seems to believe that the opposition to her special-interests laden pork barrel monstrosity is nothing but the angry twitch of the Republican counter-establishment, rather than a genuine grassroots uprising. According to the Politico, Pelosi argued that much of the current  Tea Party movement is driven by “well-funded, fake grassroots organizations, referred to as ‘astroturf.’”

Fair enough – in fact, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Astroturf organizations are involved in the tea party movement, even though this is a transparently silly attack line which was debunked last summer. What does Speaker Pelosi call her 15th and 19th biggest contributors, the SEIU and AFL-CIO, who have already engaged in criminal assault against people who oppose their agenda? What does she call ACORN, which throws rocks through the windows of people for nothing other than the crime to make money? What does she call her President, who is an explicit follower of a man who wrote the manual on how to manufacture Astroturf? 

Ms. Pelosi, whatever you have deluded yourself into thinking about your supposed “agreement” with the Tea Party movement, the fact is that your actions have shown you to be a supporter of everything the Tea Party movement, and the American people generally, despise. Once you have been suitably unseated by a courageous candidate with the convictions to not just talk about his agreement with American ideals, but also to act on them, perhaps then we will be happy to hear your case for why you have seen the light. Until then, you are part of the problem, and whatever you claim to “agree” with, we unanimously oppose you.