I’m trying not to blog for a bit while I get through some of that stuff that they call “work.”
But this, via TPM, is both too delicious and too catastrophically on point not to notice. In an interview with Chris Hayes, Nancy Pelosi assessed the performance of her successor as Speaker, delivering the results as only she could:
“Well, I will say this about John Boehner, and I have a good relationship,” Pelosi said. “If he were a woman, they’d be calling him the weakest speaker in history.”
Never one to leave her audience unsure of where she stands, a little bit later in the conversation Pelosi expanded her argument in terms suited to the meanest understanding:
“You know what, if a woman were speaker and nothing was happening in this way, they’d say, ‘Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh,’” Pelosi said. “I’m just getting a little, shall we say, tired of some of the ways they take a pass on some and not on others. We get criticized for accomplishing things. They don’t get criticized for not accomplishing things.”
Yup. Our politics, our media village, your modern GOP, all dressed up and no where to go.
Image: Pietro Longhi, Fainting, c. 1744.
El Cid
It’s so hard to tell — is it sexism? Soft bigotry of low expectations for the GOP? Both? How much of each?
Though it is kind of funny imagining a woman Republican Speaker continually having to put up with the latest House pre-hominid male eruption of blunt sexism.
mai naem
I love Nancy Pelosi but i have to admit when I was watching her last night, my thought, was if Nancy hadn’t taken off Bush impeachments/investigations off the table, we may not have the Republicans investigating every little thing the Obama people have done. The Dems just never go after the Repubs the way the Repubs go after the Dems. BTW, I wouldn’t be shocked if one of the current scandals leads to Obama being impeached(not convicted, just impeached) just so that they can say the first black Dem president got impeached. The guy who absolutely should have been impeached and convicted was Dumbya.
Ash Can
She was taking it easy on him. His own caucus has him hogtied and gagged, and they’re sitting on him and drawing dicks on his face with magic markers. And on the occasions he’s let up for air he talks about how cute it is that they’re doing that. I wish he’d just hurry up and retire; it’s getting too embarrassing to watch.
beltane
@mai naem: It is very obvious that the GOP’s response to the reelection of any Dem president, no matter his or her color, is to impeach. That’s what they do. What does make me angry is that Democratic congresses allow Republican presidents to get away with war crimes and mass murder without any pushback at all.
eric
@beltane: the reason is simple and TPM’s phrase is apt: DC is hard wired for the GOP. The press would never allow the dems to do what the GOP does. Insert your own theory here, but that is the way it works. Perhaps it is because the most likely purchasers of dead tree press skews older and GOP. But that is the reality and that is the precise point that Nancy Smash is making. She is not just smashing dickless over there, but the press that allows for the assymetry.
Omnes Omnibus
@mai naem:
Like that won’t go down in history like the big, giant steaming pile of racism that it would be. That being said, they may do it anyway because they seem to lack the ability to plan for the future.
eric
@Omnes Omnibus: the dems can only hope because that is the ONE sure fire way to mobilize dems in 2014. the GOP is going to be mobilized no matter what. Lets see if their excesses get the better of them.
atlliberal
Isn’t the whole GOP agenda to do nothing? If that’s the case, Boehner is very successful.
Chris
@eric:
The nation’s elites, including the media, are drawn from the same demographics as the Republican Party bosses and financiers and, more generally, the demographic that the Republican “cut taxes, cut regulations” economic royalism is designed to benefit. Hence the natural affinity towards them, and “DC hardwired for Republicans.”
Even back in the liberal consensus years, I suspect the royal court of Washington still felt more comfortable with Rockefeller types with the right background and credentials, than loud and boorish demagogues like Roosevelt and Truman.
red dog
@Ash Can: Very well said. Does this fool not know that everyone is lifting their leg on him. It’s time for the “spend time with my family” speech. Oh wait, they don’t want him either.
beltane
@Chris: Even during the Civil War, Washington DC was considered a Southern town with an elite that was largely sympathetic to the Confederacy. I don’t think anything has changed in this respect other than that the Republicans are now the party of the Confederacy instead of the Democrats. This is something which has plagued the country since the beginning.
eric
@Chris: all of you, please do yourself a favor and find Lewis Lapham’s essay “Versailles on the Potomac” It is brutally insightful, plus he is a truly gifted writer. Perhaps my favorite.
gogol's wife
@eric:
I am just astounded at the way the media is drumming up this impeachment fever. If the shoe were on the other foot, they’d be SKEWERING the Democrats.
Betty Cracker
I’m always amazed at how successful the Pelosi demonization campaign has been. A yahoo down the street from me has a “FIRE PELOSI!” sticker on his truck. We live 3,000 miles away from her district.
Shakezula
@Ash Can: Am I the only one who has noticed he does not look well? Maybe he has knocked off the tanning sessions but he looks unhealthy.
This is long way of saying I do suspect he will soon retire.
beltane
Slightly OT, but the Florida GOP’s Latino outreach director has quit and announced that he has become a Democrat http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/14/1208976/-REBRAND-FAIL-FL-GOP-Latino-Outreach-Director-Switches-Parties, citing Jason Richwine’s Heritage Foundation report.
chopper
@Omnes Omnibus:
nothing says ‘minority voter outreach’ like impeaching the first minority president in american history, without any actual crime to point at, but rather merely out of spite.
beltane
@Betty Cracker: It doesn’t take much to induce Republicans into hating female Democratic politicians. It would have been truly shocking if a campaign to demonize Pelosi weren’t successful.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Even if the House had brought in articles of impeachment the Senate would never have removed Bush from office. It takes a two-thirds majority to do so and that just would not have happened. Pelosi knew that and she may have known that attempting to impeach Bush would reduce impeachment of a sitting president to a ceremonial act – better to wait for the Republicans to do that.
There are any number of thing for which to criticize Ms. Pelosi, taking impeachment off of the table is far down the list.
Chris
@beltane:
Oh, well back then, it was even more blatant and a lot more regional. The nation’s capital was intentionally designed to be a convenient distance from the properties of big Virginia plantation owners, who were the 1% of their day.
The identity of the 1%’s changed a little, but the DC elite’s loyalty to them hasn’t.
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane: Not everyone has it in him to be Sisyphus.
@chopper: And yet they don’t understand why minority populations choose to vote for the other guys.
Yatsuno
@Betty Cracker: Nothing better than getting yer godless liburl hippie faggy hate on in backwoods country. We don’t need no stinkin’ plan, we got a BUMPER STICKER!!
Chris
@eric:
Apparently it’s part of a book. Will see if I can dig it up at the public library later today.
cvstoner
Actually, they are accomplishing something: destroying the government’s reputation by purposely doing nothing.
eric
@Omnes Omnibus: cause they get free stuff like food and medical care — handouts for the shiftless and lazy. that is how they see it. dems bribe the lazy with stuff so that the lazy stay lazy and keep the gravy train coming.
Suffern ACE
@gogol’s wife: I’m not. The doj has now given the press a reason to go for the administrations head. I know the AP issue is legal, but it is not wise. So I hope putting the CIAs special needs first in a cost benefit analysis is worth if for the administration.
eric
@Chris: I love the book.
one of the the most telling little stories is when lapham is rsvp’ing to a dinner function and was in between jobs at the time. the hostess on the phone was at a loss as to what to do because he would not have a job listed on his seating placard. it was as if he no longer mattered.
srv
Nancy’s bigotry towards lazy white men is duly noted.
schrodinger's cat
@eric: Democrats won the Asian vote and the new immigrant vote handily during the last election, do the GOP mouth breathers think that each and everyone one of those people vote for the Dems because they get a free handout?
eric
@schrodinger’s cat: you used Gop and think in the same sentence. it has nothing to do with thinking. the new immigrants are easy to shrug off because they are all lazy mexicans that want free stuff and as for Asians, they dont exist to the the GOP and unless i am wrong, probably live mostly is very strong blue states so that the GOP does not have to care as much. just a guess on that one
Ash Can
@beltane: OK, that made me LOL!
beltane
@eric: To the GOP Asians are either invisible or they are lumped into the “latte drinking elitist” category of people they hate. They are not RealAmericans and that’s all that matters at the end of the day.
schrodinger's cat
@eric: The newly naturalized citizens are not all Latino, they are only about 1/3 Latino. Naturalized citizens form about 8% of the electorate.
RaflW
@eric:
The press are elite snobs. They may be liberal in some vauge sense (and thus also vulnerable to GOP attacks about ‘balance’ and ‘bias’) but they’re also elite brownnosers.
This matters because Republicans, in person, play the insider, cubby, we’re all better than those morans on the praire game, and throw better parties with more expensive booze.
Dems are boring and wonky and earnest and remind media types of the kids in highschool that they never liked (but were too similar to for comfort). Drinking PBR for retro-chic eludes the blue suit meida men.
As I see it, a lot of media bias is fucking highschool popularity bullshit writ large and set up to ruin America. Cheers and good morning.
ETA: Media elites – top reporters and editors – make bank and like low taxes too.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: You are bringing actual facts into play; eric is describing what appears to be going on in the wing-nut mind – apparently, he speaks wing-nut.
rikyrah
Nancy Smash cracks me up with regards to Orange Julius
eric
@schrodinger’s cat: i know that….i am just offering GOP speak
eric
@Omnes Omnibus: I speak jive.
Omnes Omnibus
@eric: Wow, multilingual.
Zifnab
@schrodinger’s cat: Are we talking about sane Republicans intent on being honest with themselves, or Real ‘Murkican! Republicans that know in their guts what those sneaky Mexican’ts are up to?
The GOP has put itself in the perfect trap. Republicans demonize immigrants. Immigrants fail to vote for Republicans, because they don’t like being demonized. Republicans realize that immigrants aren’t going to vote for them, so they try to suppress immigration. Which leads to Republicans being even more aggressive in their demonization of immigrants. :-p
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Omnes Omnibus: In this case, it’s actually not that hard to think wingnut: Turn your empathy down to the point where you use your skin color as a test pattern.
Corner Stone
I think the real question is exactly how badly is Obama mind screwing his opponents with this latest version of 11-D Chess?
He’s got them right where he wants them.
Chris
@RaflW:
I think they’re vaguely liberal when it comes to social issues, but it’s not something that carries great weight with them because at their level of wealth, it doesn’t really matter (so what if the SoCons reverse Roe v. Wade and ban abortion? Either they’ll have a family doctor who knows how to be discrete or they can simply fly their wives or daughters to Canada).
ETA:
I think the guys out on the prairie vaguely sense this, which is why the teabagger “DC is full of RINOs! We must purge them!” thing fires them up (and also has a very slight basis in truth). In practice, though, they’re just being led around by the nose just like always.
Roger Moore
@mai naem:
Nonsense. The Democrats didn’t impeach Bush I or Reagan, and that didn’t do anything to slow down the investigation of Clinton. The Republicans are going to do everything they can to interfere with a Democratic administration, and there’s nothing the Democrats can do to stop it. The best they can do is to minimize the damage by keeping the Republicans in a minority and failing to provide any real scandals for them to complain about.
schrodinger's cat
@Zifnab: Did you see what Sully’s favorite Tories are doing in UK. They are trying to make landlords into immigration enforcers. Apparently they want to change the laws so that landlords can ask you for your papers, which I think is way worse than Arizona’s infamous law.
Yatsuno
@schrodinger’s cat: Someone should tell Sully it sounds better in the original German. Then again, maybe not. He’d get a stiffie for days.
Zifnab
@Corner Stone:
11-D chess is cute in theory. In practice, Obama is scrambling just to keep the nation’s lights on while GOPers run around smashing shit and screaming “Democrats did it!”
He’s a good politician, but the deck is stacked against him by orders of magnitude. There’s only so much you can do when you’ve got half your party dragging its feet at the idea of bucking their corporate overlords, and the entirety of the opposition party operating in virtually bullet-proof gerrymandered house districts who are free to fuck over whomever they damn well please.
Chris
@Zifnab:
One for the history nerds – when’s the last time the deck was stacked this badly against a liberal president?
schrodinger's cat
@Yatsuno: Some right wing nativist party kicked the Tories ass in elections recently, hence the run towards the right. I don’t know if Sully has commented on it.
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
Interesting; that’s the same dynamic that’s been going on in France for the last few years (Sarkozy campaigned on “taking back votes from the FN” back in 2007 and his party’s been tacking farther and farther right in an effort to please them. Sort of yet another Southern Strategy).
Sorry to hear the British right is going the same way.
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: UKIP is what the Tea Party would have been if it were a genuine grass roots movement instead of a corporate-funded astroturf project.
raven
@Chris: When did we ever have a liberal president? Don’t even bring that LBJ fuck up.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, FDR (with a big asterisk for internment).
ETA: @Yatsuno: I think TR qualifies. I should have put him in my list.
Yatsuno
@raven: Roosevelt could have been. No not FDR, his cousin, if the Bull Moose Party had ended up winning.
drkrick
@eric: The press doesn’t “allow” the Dems or the GOP to do anything. They can whine, but they have no real power. The GOP started the game of calling the press a liberal cabal and daring them to do anything about it 40 years ago and found out they were pretty easily cowed, eventually taking us to the point where they ignore every unwritten rule and tradition in town when needed to get their way. If the Dems had the same stones to ignore the bleatings from the neo-Broderists they would pretty quickly find out the same thing.
That would pretty quickly lead to an even more chaotic process of government, but it would probably yield a marginally better policy outcome than the current situation of unilateral surrender and might even motivate some people to address the problem. Might.
gene108
@beltane:
The Special Prosecutor option, post-Watergate had been so badly abused by the Republicans in the 1990’s, it was scrapped.
When Rove told Congress to fuck itself, because he wasn’t going to testify, despite a subpoena, what exactly should Congressional Dems have done? What could they do?
To say Congressional Democrats did nothing between 2007-2009, when Bush & Co. were in power is a misnomer. The problem is they did not have the tools to overcome the unprecedented levels of obstruction Bush & Co. threw their way.
Like official White House communications being sent via the RNC server, which mysteriously died in a fire and so all the e-mails or any other form of recorded communication from Bush & Co. just didn’t exist or vanished and so couldn’t be used to build a case against them.
Kucinich and a few others even tried drawing up articles of impeachment.
The problem is the MSM is wired for Republican overlordship and the Republicans control so much of the media, it is damn near impossible to build a level of public outrage sufficient to force elected Republican officials to be held accountable for anything.
The lesson learned from Watergate wasn’t to not be crooks, but to make sure you can’t be caught and if you are caught make sure you can level so much crap at your accusers – via the media – they have to back to down.
Bush & Co. executed this strategy as well as anyone could have, which is why their weren’t any major scalps for Congressional Dems to get. They made sure there was nothing there that could be used as evidence against them.
raven
@Yatsuno: Well there ya have it!
scav
@Roger Moore: Much Closer to it. To judge each and every move throughout all depts at all times through the lens of what an insane politically motivated opposition might do with it is pretty much impracticable, impossible, and a wasted effort. and, to my eyes at least, wrong (even if I’m not wild about every decision they’ve made to any degree).
drkrick
@Omnes Omnibus: FDR gets that asterisk for internment as well as tolerance of Jim Crow. I’d nominate Truman as the closest thing to a liberal President in anything like modern terms.
Yatsuno
Way OT: go to Google and search “atari breakout” then bring up images.
Jockey Full of Malbec
@RaflW:
White professionals earning seven figures lean GOP.
In other news, water is somewhat moist.
joes527
As painful as it is for me to see war criminals walking the street, and building libraries-n-stuff, I think that the dems not trying to impeach Bush was needed. If they had, then never again would an X Prez stand while a Y house sat.
The R’s in the house might be wise to look into what happens when you come at a king*. A swing and a miss at the impeachment plate would be another nail in the coffin of the party of Lincoln. (hmmm… needz moar metaphors)
* No, I’m not saying Obama is a king. Nor am I saying that he would off them personally. (though that would be very satisfying to watch) Just that a failed impeachment attempt (and bu failed, I mean not leading to conviction)would be very damaging to the R’s
AxelFoley
@Chris:
Jimmy Carter?
And on the point of Presidents with the entirety of the opposition party against them and half their own party backstabbing them, that’s why we’ve only had three Democratic Presidents since 1968.
xian
free proofreading to someone upthread: “misnomer” is using the wrong word for something (“misnamed” literally). I think what’s wanted is misconception or misinterpretation.
catclub
@beltane: ” successful.”
Successful at what, is the question.
Successful at enraging your followers at the opponents’ leader is a pretty low bar.
Enraging the nation at your opponents’ leader has clearly not happened.
AxelFoley
@Yatsuno:
*eyes Yatsuno suspiciously*
Is this safe for work?
Patricia Kayden
That “Fainting” painting is delish!
Unfortunately, Nancy Smash won’t get back the leadership for a while given the gerrymandering from 2010. Too bad.
catclub
@joes527: Not going after George Bush was a lesser failure than not going after Reagan fro Iran/Contra. It was thought to be ‘too soon’ after Watergate and the nation could not afford another failed presidency. yeah, right.
catclub
@beltane: “To the GOP Asians are either invisible or they are lumped into the “latte drinking elitist” category of people they hate. They are not RealAmericans and that’s all that matters at the end of the day. ”
I think that fact that Asian Americans went for Obama at an even higher rate than Latinos was a real shock to the GOP.
And it should be. They expected to win many of them by right.
They have all the economic demographics which _should_ tend to lean GOP. When they don’t, it could be very bad news long term fro the GOP.
Omnes Omnibus
@AxelFoley:
Yes, and it is fun for the whole family.
beltane
@catclub: The problem for the GOP is that it is highly unwelcoming not only to non-whites, but even to those who don’t belong to a certain subset of white people. Outside the ranks of their ultra-wealthy supporters, the GOP represents a very distinct culture within this country, one with a distinct country-western tang, and which is very aggressively anti-intellectual, anti-funny food, and anti-all religions that are not of the evangelical Christian variety.
Chris
@catclub:
I think their only contact with those minorities is with conservative Catholic Latinos and evangelical Asians that they meet through their church groups and public rallies, where they scream alongside them about abortion, The Ghey, Fucking Commies and Hajjis, and the Fucking Libs who’re soft on all of the above.
Ergo, they assume that all These People are like that and care about these issues and nothing else. It’s just that a lot of them haven’t realized it yet because the libs lied to them or promised them free stuff (being stupid and easily misguided, they fell for it).
Patricia Kayden
@chopper: Well they are working hard to disenfranchise minority voters and may even get an assist from the Supremes.
Violet
I sure miss NANCY SMASH and her gavel.
Trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Next you know, he’ll be boycotting Rice-a-Roni.
I thought Mark Sanford “debating” a Pelosi poster was some kind of droll performance piece, but the voters proved me wrong. Thanks, Clint.
The Other Chuck
@catclub:
I guess if the GOP had the foresight to see how rampant anti-intellectualism is perceived in communities that tend to value educational achievement, they wouldn’t be the dumb fucks they’re inclined to be in the first place.