Shut Up, Nancy!

Nancy Pelosi has a lot of damn gall.

Right after Kamala Harris conceded the 2024 election, she blamed President Biden for Harris's loss.  The former Speaker of the House - and no, I'm not calling her "Speaker Emerita," that's just a title Democrats came up with to rub it in against Republicans  that there hasn't been a Republican Speaker who remained in the House after losing the gavel to a Democrat since Joe Martin in the 1950s - blasted Biden for not withdrawing from his bid for a second term earlier to allow a primary/caucus process to pick a new candidate and for immediately endorsing Harris to avoid a brokered convention.

What a bitch.

I'm sorry, but I have zero respect for someone who led the circular firing squad against Biden this past summer when he faltered in his one and only debate with Donald Trump in June.  Biden had a bad night, to be sure, but numerous Presidents had recovered from bad debate performances - even performances worse than Biden's, as Ronald Reagan's first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984 proved.  Biden was never truly respected in Washington, and as soon as he stumbled badly enough, they pounced like hyenas, and Pelosi led the pack.  You might recall that the more Biden dug in and vowed to stay in the campaign, the more Pelosi said she was waiting for Biden to "do the right thing" and make his decision on quitting it.  She and many other Democratic leaders had asked Biden what his decision on the presidential campaign going forward was, whether he would stay in, and he said he would.  But Nancy Pelosi wouldn't have that.

Pelosi's power play appalled historian Allan Lichtman, who said that he had never seen such a naked public trashing of an incumbent Democratic President by his own party.  MSNBC commentator Symone Sanders-Townsend, who has worked for President Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, echoed  Lichtman's sentiments, angrily saying on MSNBC this past weekend that Pelosi had not only doomed Biden's chances of winning by undermining his resolve to stay in the campaign but had failed to meaningfully support Harris as his substitute.   

"She played in presidential politics this cycle, and she helped orchestrate the very public demise of the president,” Sanders-Townsend said. She praised her former boss, Biden, saying: "And thank God for Joe Biden, that he came out and, yes, endorsed his VP. 'Cause these people wanted an open primary . . ..  For what?"

For what, indeed?  How could an open primary be set up after Pelosi forced him out in the month between then and the convention?  Pelosi did say that Harris ran a great and inspiring campaign, but that doesn't excuse her ongoing public bark-stripping of the President.   

Sanders-Townsend also quite rightly called attention to Pelosi's apparent failure to ensure a Democratic House majority, as the control of the House of Representatives in the coming 119th Congress at this writing is still not determined and it will come down to a few seats in Pelosi's home state of California.  "I'm gonna say it . . .. Nancy Pelosi, everybody talks about how the Speaker Emerita, you know, she’s so strategic, she can count, she did all of that when she was the speaker in Congress, but my question is: Where is your calculator now?" She added that Democrats were “about to lose the daggone House," suggesting that Pelosi’s successful effort to force Biden to drop his re-election bid led to what happened. 

Joe Biden has been accused of hubris for opting to seek a second presidential term, but the truth is that there was no one other than Kamala Harris who could replace him - the talent pool in the Democratic party having been drained a good deal from years of Democratic "stars" losing elections and being sent off into political internal exile for it - and Harris, being Vice President, was a largely unknown quantity among the voters.  And voters didn't like what they did know about her.  But because she had the chops to be President, and because many party leaders, including Representative Jim Clyburn (D-SC), thought she had earned the right to be Biden's pinch hitter, the choice of Harris without a messy brokered convention that would have left a lot of sore feelings was logical.

Wrong, apparently, but logical.

Biden has always been a fighter who keeps getting back up.  Indeed, he was almost like those old egg-shaped Weeble action figures of the 1970s - he wobbled but he didn't fall down.  Pelosi knocked him over, wouldn't let him get back up, bashed him after the election for making his decision to withdraw at the wrong time only after she belittled him and trashed him in public, and didn't pay attention to her own bailiwick and to diminishing Democratic chances of taking the House back.   So how is the election result Biden's (or Harris's) fault?

The whole thing reeks.