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Pelosi Scared That Biden May Have Accidentally Helped Marjorie Taylor Greene with Speech Misstep

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As former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi transitions into just plain ol’ Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi (a transition which didn’t go smoothly, it’s worth noting), California’s media institutions are celebrating the most famous, trailblazingest woman to ever slur her way through a Democratic House leadership media briefing.

To that end, the Los Angeles Times ran a profile piece on the former speaker Monday that managed to combine the vibe of an office retirement party and a political hagiography in a single article.

This is the way liberal media outlets treat the Golden State’s ossified Democrats: As if they were holy beings, bringing light upon everything they touch. Sayeth not a nasty word about Dianne Feinstein’s legacy, in those pages, no sir. So I’m a cynical man.

But that doesn’t mean reading this dreck was a loss — for in between praising her old and awesome self, the L.A. Times also got Pelosi to admit, quite unintentionally, that President Joe Biden is so far gone he’s making a conservative folk hero out of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I’ve read the piece and, for the most part, and it’s what you expect: The Times sent one of of their political votaries out to shadow Nancy for 24 hours now that she no longer has the speaker’s gavel, to see what her life consists of.

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For the most part, you get the feeling the whole exercise was such a scripted version of faux-reality that it could have been titled “Real Housewives of Capitol Hill.” Hagiographers don’t have time for irony, though, so the actual title was “‘I’m emancipated now’: Nancy Pelosi enjoying life after leadership.”

Which is already the first implicit untruth. In fact, she was “emancipated” by younger Democratic lawmakers who’d made her promise back in 2018 that her last term as leader would be in 2022. It wasn’t that she was (hah!) too conservative for them, it’s that she’s reached an age where, even when a bee gets in her bonnet, she gets distracted about the issue and slurs some talking points, and, oh, I can’t even. Good morning. Sunday morning.

Is Nancy Pelosi more competent than Joe Biden?

So this is who we are dealing with. But the totally real, not-reality-TV-style journalism exercise certainly captured a woman on the move. From Nolan D. McCaskill’s piece:

“The Times spent a day with Pelosi and her team to see how the former House speaker is adjusting to life outside of leadership. She began it with ice cream for breakfast and finished it church-style dancing to a performance of the Resistance Revival Chorus.

“’You never can dance too much,’ she advises.

“This is Pelosi in her newest chapter, living her best life without the stresses of having to steer congressional Democrats past political pitfalls and through policy quicksand. Her colleagues say she’s essentially a national congresswoman — a woman who represents a single district but has a platform that extends far beyond the borders of San Francisco — and is someone other Democrats look to for advice and wisdom.”

There are downsides, obviously, as McCaskill notes: “She’s able to speak her mind more freely, but she still wants to pick and choose her moments because she no longer speaks for the House Democratic Caucus. She’s given up the 24/7 schedule of a party leader, but she has to find new ways to fill her calendar because she has no committee assignments and loathes downtime. And as she’s traded in her leadership title for the honorific speaker emerita, Pelosi has lost the bulk of her staff and coveted office space.”

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Well, yes. Sorry, but that’s what happens to people of That Certain Age™. This 82-year-old isn’t intellectually spry, no matter how much you want to spackle over the inconvenient fact she’s long past the point of diminishing returns.

President Joe Biden is a higher-mileage 80 than Pelosi is at 82, however. That issue came up with the L.A. Times piece while the Pelosi was watching Biden’s budget proposal outline speech — after lunch, of course, and the pro forma meetings with constituents. McCaskill’s description of the scene:

“She sits in a chair positioned just a few feet from an entertainment center with four small Samsung TVs inside. On the top left screen is MSNBC’s broadcast of the president’s address. On the bottom left screen is C-SPAN2, where the Senate is taking up a judicial nominee.

“Pelosi can’t resist coaching the president, even though he can’t hear or see her.

“She groans when Biden alludes to Trump as ‘the former president — and maybe future president.’

“’Oh, please. Don’t even say such a thing,’ she says. ‘That isn’t kidding. That’s horrible.’

“Pelosi, who rises about 15 minutes into the speech to snack on a large chocolate chip cookie, gives the president light applause at different moments of his address, but also tries to will him into pivoting back toward the camera after turning his back to it, wagging her index finger in a circle as she urges him to turn around.

“‘He’s going to raise her a million dollars by mentioning her name,’ she laments after Biden references ‘the gentlelady from Georgia,’ Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

Well, you can’t say the elderly don’t speak their mind freely.

This is what the Democrats think of Joe Biden when they don’t have to pay fealty to Joe Biden. He’s cracking up. He’s making MTG look good! Can we control the president by remote? And, let me remind you, even Nancy Pelosi has a mental filter at 82 — a diminished filter, for sure, but a filter.

She knows enough that Biden drawing attention to Greene and attacking her is exactly the kind of publicity Greene wants in her home district and with other conservatives. It brings to mind a Japanese word that would apply in this situation: “mokusatsu.” There’s no absolute literal translation of the term, but the most measured one is “death by silence.”

Biden is so fixated on the “ultra-MAGA Republicans” like Greene that he thinks he can distract America like a dog with a squirrel by the mere invocation of her. And yet, even Nancy Pelosi — in a shape that’s far from anything resembling her glory days — knows enough that if Biden really wanted to effectively stop helping populist Republicans, the answer is mokusatsu. Biden, alas, doesn’t do mokusatsu-ing very well.

And so thorough is his inability to judge the situation that, even in this scripted feel-good piece where Nancy knows to pretend that her average day begins with ice cream for breakfast and ends with some dancing with the Resistance Revival Chorus — which bills itself on its website as “a collective of more than 60 women, and non-binary singers, who join together to breathe joy and song into the resistance, and to uplift and center women’s voices” — she couldn’t help but let on she thinks Biden screwed up.

No, instead of riding off into the sunset as a good soldier for party unity, she’s coaching the president from afar — and in front of a reporter. She’s noting what she thinks are his mistakes in regards to Marjorie Taylor Greene. And, here’s the kicker: She’s probably right, she’s more competent than he is, and he’s the one who’s supposed to be the most powerful man the world.

It’s like watching two walking corpses, one offering advice to the other. Let’s see if the other corpse takes it. Heck, let’s see if he even reads it — or can remember who this Nancy Pelosi woman is.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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