Maureen Dowd’s latest Times published hagiography of Nancy Pelosi generated no small amount of backlash on social media when it went live this Saturday. And rightfully so: it might be one of the worst things published in the paper in recent memory, even accounting for the time their editorial page used the dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents to warn about the dangers of Iran to stability in the region.
From the outset “It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade” makes clear that it will be another iteration in the access journalism genre. The framing is unabashed adulation: a jarring a shift from recent coverage of Pelosi as she ushered the Democrats into passing billions of dollars of funding for what are now commonly known as concentration camps. But that world, the one we live in, is entirely alien to Dowd’s piece. To both her and Pelosi, it may as well not exist at all.
The Nightmare Begins
I am not exaggerating when I say that Pelosi spends more time criticizing black women to her political left in the house than she does talking about the phenomenon of the camps where we now receive daily reports of death due to neglect and abuse. Camps which, again, Pelosi failed to fight the funding of despite people in her party clamoring for direct action.
Her explanation for her role in assenting to this crime against humanity? She felt it was the best she could get. No fighting for a better one, just accepting that what was offered was the best they could do before she, no joke, retired to her Napa valley vineyard to drink wine and draft cutting takedowns of the president like the one that opens Dowd’s fan-letter of an article. “If he could be president, this glass of water could be president!” Pelosi exclaimed as Dowd tells it.
Is Nancy Pelosi even aware that Trump is, and has been, president? For years now? It shouldn’t go without explicit observation that not only is her joke horrible and uninspired, it is emblematic of the detachment from real people that exists between people like Dowd and Pelosi and say, people who would actually see funding concentration camps as a line not to be crossed – or considered. Dowd presents it as hilarious, or insightful, or at least something worth including in your copy, and it receives literally as much attention as Pelosi’s reasoning for funding concentration camps.
That is to say: Dowd didn’t feel the need to press her about the issue, so it’s not some trick of editing at the Times that makes Pelosi appear more concerned with punching left than her role in funding genocide, I believe it authentically didn’t occur to either of them to talk about it. Calling this article a fan-letter may have been overly generous, what’s occurring here is actually fan-fiction.
Dispatches from the Hipster Coffee Shop
Dowd makes mention of anonymous detractors who have since turned into Pelosi supporters, confiding – anonymously of course – to Dowd that they admire the way she’s “gotten into Trump’s head” and “put together a winning coalition.” Once again, this article was published in the immediate aftermath of the Democrats taking what Mitch McConnell offered them and rolling over on funding concentration camps. What victory was actually won here? Is the way you get into Trump’s head by giving him what he asked for? The reasoning here is, at best, utterly incoherent and more likely, intentionally obfuscating.
Dowd writes, “In an era when millennials prize authenticity, she said, McConnell is ‘authentically terrible.’ She has had a working relationship with him for years but now, she says, the Senate majority leader has ‘really crossed a threshold with me.’”
Why even make that first statement if you’re going to follow it up by admitting that you’ve worked with him for years? Less than a hundred words earlier in this piece she is talking about passing Mitch McConnell’s bill because it was the best she could get. What threshold was crossed if funding concentration camps was still in play? How is this in any way emblematic of her own authenticity other than demonstrating that she too is authentically terrible?
Pelosi puts any doubts about her own authentic failures to rest immediately though as she shifts to blaming the Republicans for an evident lack of conscience. Dowd allows Pelosi to go unchallenged on this point as well, treating Pelosi’s statement that “understand this: they don’t care” as some kind of actual observation and not Pelosi more or less lampooning how totally useless she is for the present situation. Nazis have been rallying in every city in the nation and have accrued a body count in the hundreds in the last few years alone, we have footage of actual concentration camps being run within the US, ICE has admitted it literally can not track how many detainees it has killed, and Pelosi thinks she is being insightful by saying “they don’t care” hours after she gave the Republicans the funding they asked for. Judged by her own words it would appear Nancy Pelosi has no idea what she’s doing or merely what she wants, other than to continue being Nancy Pelosi.
The Times columnist can not stop herself from slavering over Pelosi, replete with persistent references to her fashion ensemble, in between sharing quotes that demonstrate that the woman herself can not act as though her career is anything but a checkered failure. It’s why Dowd offers vacant platitudes about the “treacherous nature” of the job, or completely unexplained mentions of Pelosi’s “remarkable skill.” It’s utter ahistoric nonsense even if you don’t look outside the happenings of this week. It’s utter ahistoric nonsense even if you don’t look outside the events described in the beginning of the article.
A Persistent Problem
This type of inexplicable hand-waving of Pelosi’s shortcomings isn’t simply a failure of this piece though – and it is here in spades – it’s more or less the defining feature of Pelosi’s entire public image. Consider the title again, “It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade.” Wow, sure is nothing askew with framing a celebration of America’s gay rights’ movement as somehow the responsibility of a multi-millionaire white woman who has been married to a venture capitalist since the 60s! It is astounding that no one at the Times saw any issue with the framing of this article given that even by the most generous standards, Pelosi did not show up for the gay rights movement until it had already been going for more than a decade in earnest.
Despite her self-mythologizing as one of Washington’s greatest LGBT allies, she did not vocally support gay marriage in San Francisco until after the state’s supreme court attempted to vacate the marriages. She has remained pointedly silent about California Democrat mega-donor Ed Buck who has now made headlines two consecutive years in a row because he abducts poor, black, and gay men and forces them to overdose on drugs for his amusement. Her self-stylizing as the cool moderate-in-charge in Dowd’s article high-lights what has actually been a decades long history of toleration for the most right wing members of the Democrats while she has reserved her vitriol for those to her left.
As recently as 2018, Pelosi has used her authority in the house to back anti-gay Democrat incumbents – in this case literally the only Democrat to vote for a bill that would have defined marriage as “limited to heterosexual couples” in 2015 – against the primary endorsements of state and local Democrats. Clinton won the aforementioned Illinois’ district by 15 percent in 2016. Any excuse of the necessity of appealing to moderates is entirely unhinged.
Considered alongside the DCCC’s recent decision to blacklist primary challengers to Democrat incumbents from funds, it’s clear that Pelosi envisions herself as above partisan politics when it comes to sabotaging her own party’s progressives. Why else would she be taking swipes at the black women of the house that she otherwise uses for photo-ops whenever possible?
This type of cognitive dissonance is what makes this Dowd article so embarrassing for both the writer and Speaker: appreciation of Nancy Pelosi at this level of deification is only possible by someone who has refused to research her record, or in Dowd’s case, do any actual journalism.
A Record Worth Reflecting On
If you wish to go back to Pelosi’s days as an advocate for recognition of the AIDS crisis, you should probably not skip over her supporting the 94 crime bill. Or the Patriot Act, of which she said she stood “shoulder to shoulder” with the president on. Or No Child Left Behind.
Dowd’s fantasy extends to characterizing Pelosi as someone who “passionately fought the misbegotten Iraq war.” Sure, Pelosi initially voted against the authorization, but in the years after she voted on no less than 5 occasions to prevent the Democrats from formally opposing the war as a party, or asking for set time-tables for troop withdrawal. She has, of course, had a hand in every imperialist military debacle and grotesquely swollen defense budget passed since.
Actual assessment of Pelosi’s record can not hide the fact that she has been seated so close to throne for so long that she had advance notice of the Bush administration doing unconstitutional wiretapping more than half a year before it went public and she did absolutely nothing about it. In fact, since then she’s helped whip votes to scuttle Democrat legislation designed at limiting the NSA’s spying capability.
All this is to say that what Dowd is doing in this piece is so detached from actual information gathering that it can only be classified as anti-journalism. Despite scarce mentioning of Pelosi funding the camps, she’s allowed ample space in the piece to talk nonsense about her designs on impeachment. She muses on whether Trump should be impeached, whether it’s his plan to get impeached, and what impeachment really means. It’s all garbage, as once again, Pelosi’s record speaks far louder than she herself can.
Impeachment: A Saga
In 2016 the line was that Trump stole the election and should be impeached, then in 2017 it was that the Mueller report would surely vindicate the Democrats and they should not get hasty, then in 2018 and 19 the Mueller report came and went with Pelosi claiming that it had utterly verified the Democrat’s accusation that Trump stole the election. And now with their coup de grâce firmly in place, their victory assured, and Trump’s crimes exposed in plain text by the special prosecutor, Pelosi decided it was high-time to let Trump govern until the election anyway. Now, as Pelosi says verbatim, “he every day practically self-impeaches by obstructing justice and ignoring the subpoenas.” Maybe because he’s realized you won’t do a god damn thing Nancy.
The truth is that the pageantry of the investigation had run its course: to get Democratic leadership to a point where they could reasonably pretend that the sophisticated political maneuver was now to remain in their holding pattern of doing nothing.
It is is a disgrace that Maureen Dowd is allowed to pretend that she is a journalist when faced with Pelosi saying to her things such as, the president literally told her thanks for not impeaching me but she saw through his ruse, and Dowd faithfully reports it like Pelosi is not either dangerously incompetent at her job or willfully collaborative with America’s rising white supremacist sentiment.
Again, this returns to the fact that Nancy Pelosi is only Nancy Pelosi in a mythical sense: her entire brand predicated on the actual vacuity lying just underneath the surface.
Three Decades Spent Deciding
Dowd gives Pelosi space to talk about how she has in her basement “signs for single-payer from 30 years ago” as evidence that Pelosi knows more and is simply the capital E Educated moderate in the room, while ignoring that for about 20 of those 30 years since Pelosi has been one of the five most powerful people in American government. She literally had a hand in stripping single-payer provisions from the ACA – which it should be noted, Dowd gives her fawning praise for passing- even going so far as suggesting that Obama could not have passed it “without her muscle.”
More historical revisionism of course, because in the process of passing the ACA, Pelosi wasted a Democrat supermajority and allowed more than a hundred Republican amendments to the bill despite it passing without a single Republican vote regardless. The “remarkable skill” Dowd praises of Pelosi actually looks like dismal failure under the gentlest scrutiny.
An actual journalist also might have sparred with Pelosi over her characterization of herself as a moderate on this issue. More than 70 percent of Americans support single-payer. Pelosi’s dogged refusal to entertain the system as a possibility definitionally means she is outside normal public opinion. This is without making mention that her aids and associates have been repeatedly caught assuring donors and business owners that she will fight policies such as Medicare For All. What’s obvious here is that Nancy Pelosi is and has always been an opponent of single-payer health care. There is no other way to portray her actions when remaining mindful of how much power she has wielded and for how long.
Notre Damnation
Pelosi’s privileged position in liberal mythology is likely because she herself requires the most blind obedience to dogma to believe in. Dowd can not help herself from praising Pelosi for her longevity on the hill, but fails to interrogate what has happened during her tenure. America has somehow descended into fascism with a cartoonish Mussolini caricature in the oval office and concentration camps now dotting the border, but Pelosi evades accountability despite having had more power than nearly anyone to stop it.
And while Dowd makes sure to mention her routine defense of power from challengers, often as her allies praised her superpowered fund-raising abilities, if you ask to what end those funds have been raised it becomes obvious that Pelosi and the Democrats have nothing to show for it than their own enrichment. Under Pelosi’s watch the Democrats have hemorrhaged literally thousands of seats in state and local legislatures leading to Republicans nearly being able to convene a constitutional convention with 75 percent of state governments. A Democrat supermajority was squandered on legislation which has failed to remedy the grotesque health disparities between America and the rest of the world. Pelosi couldn’t even pretend she would honor Obama’s signature Iran deal while he was still in office. The “blue wave” she touted would change Trump’s presidency after the 2018 midterms has culminated in voting to fund concentration camps while Pelosi herself invents ever more fanciful excuses for not actually doing anything about the president’s criminality- as her own deputy chief of staff does damage control on Twitter for how utterly reviled his boss has become.
Has anyone considered informing Nancy Pelosi that if two of the most popular presidents in modern history belong to your party and you can not translate it to any kind of legislative or electoral victory, it is because you are remarkably bad at your job?
“But Bono came”
Dowd’s article-length love poem concludes with an anecdote which itself encapsulates the failure of Pelosi’s premature canonization: Pelosi mangled by getting her hand caught in the car door of her motorcade while stopping over in Ireland for an address to parliament, nevertheless shakes hundreds of hands without receiving proper medical attention. Dowd makes no mention of what the address to parliament was about and Pelosi ignores the subject as well, instead concluding with Pelosi grinning as she recalls that Bono came to the speech.
What better ending could there be for a woman whose most viral moment of the year came from her evidently applauding the president, even defending in interviews after the fact that she was doing so, as her near cult-like following insisted she had become “The Patron Saint of Shade”? At every level her fandom is evidence that liberals believe in nothing, going so far as to openly despise reality, and have chosen as the matriarch of their church a woman who embodies a politics of aesthetic rebellion coupled with faithful collaboration. A saint who stands for nothing but her own canonization. The patron saint of vapidity.
Kyle is a four-letter word 