Nancy Pelosi Did A Bad Thing

There’s something Nancy Pelosi did recently that makes me wonder why no one is calling for her to be fired. It has also gotten very little attention.

This was in a San Francisco Chronicle piece about concerns of Dianne Feinstein’s capability to do her job.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a statement to The Chronicle, said she had not noticed a decline in Feinstein’s memory and noted her work on the recent reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and the Supreme Court confirmation.

“Senator Feinstein is a workhorse for the people of California and a respected leader among her colleagues in the Senate,” Pelosi said. “She is constantly traveling between California and the Capitol, working relentlessly to ensure Californians’ needs are met and voices are heard.”

Pelosi said it was “unconscionable that, just weeks after losing her beloved husband of more than four decades and after decades of outstanding leadership to our City and State, she is being subjected to these ridiculous attacks that are beneath the dignity in which she has led and the esteem in which she is held.”

Slandering people who are telling the truth should be considered beyond the pale in congressional le

One wrinkle is that there’s stuff behind the scenes we don’t know, as these are comments from staffers and elected officials speaking off the record. But it does really appear that Feinstein’s struggles are common knowledge in Washington, so Nancy Pelosi should know that she lied about people who were telling the truth. If she didn’t know when she made a statement to the press, I’m sure someone got in touch with her afterwards.

This is a sad situation. Feinstein and Pelosi have been friends for a long time, likely going back to even before the late 1970s when Pelosi was a member of the DNC from San Francisco and Feinstein was its first female mayor. I can appreciate the desire to protect a friend, but there are other ways to do it than shredding your credibility.

In her defense of Feinstein, she did insult the people coming forward with what appears to be accurate information. This is the specific thing that’s pissing me off. An important principle is that people should not be attacked for telling the truth, and anyone who does this should be called out. Here Pelosi seems to be the toxic combination of obnoxious and wrong. And if she’s calling people who are saying something true “unconscionable” and saying that their correct observations are “ridiculous attacks that are beneath the dignity in which (Feinstein) has led and the esteem in which she is held” it reflects very poorly on her. Either her judgment is bad (including the decision to make a statement blasting people concerned about Feinstein), or she knows that what she’s saying is untrue. In either case, it makes it easier to ignore her in the future, as well as the Democratic politicians who don’t call her out.

There’s an argument that some older people have good days and bad days, and this may be the case with Feinstein. However, someone who consistently has days of confusion and lethargy should not have a prominent time-sensitive job like being a Senator. It is the moral responsibility of everyone within that person’s sphere of influence to get them to resign as soon as possible.

An inevitable response will be that someone will point out something that Kevin McCarthy did that is as sketchy or worse, without the benefit of someone trying to help out a friend. And I’m totally fine with pushing him out of congressional leadership as well.