NANCY SMASH!

The Capitol Police first installed cameras around Pelosi’s home more than eight years ago; she has an around-the-clock security detail; and for many months after the attacks of Jan. 6, 2021, a San Francisco police cruiser sat outside her home day and night. But hours after Pelosi left San Francisco last week and returned to D.C., much of the security left with her, and officers in Washington stopped continuously monitoring video feeds outside her house.

The targeted security and lack of full-time, active surveillance — even at the home of the member of Congress with the most death threats — reflect the competing demands facing local and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as the balances that lawmakers, their families and security officials have tried to strike in the nearly two years since the attack on the Capitol.

The Capitol Police have been working to implement more than 100 security improvements recommended by outside experts, including enhancements to officer training, equipment, protocols and staffing. But the department has simultaneously faced a tenfold increase in threats to members of Congress, who regularly return to their home districts and crisscross the country….

While other members of Congress may face episodic threats, Pelosi is the subject of the most violent death threats against any lawmaker, and their volume is both high and continuous, a law enforcement official said.

Police attribute the scale of the threats to her being demonized by Republicans, being a woman and being second in line to the presidency. She has a protective detail of two to three diplomatic security agents of the Capitol Police wherever she travels, including inside the Capitol, as well as a police officer who is a driver, the official said…

Hah stupid libs are spreading disinfo by saying he was trying to assassinate her. He was merely trying to kidnap her and bludgeon her. I am a serious journalist https://t.co/mFnTySyn23

— Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 (@Wilson__Valdez) November 2, 2022

“Sadistic glee in harming others is a sin (at least in my faith). But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy,” ⁦@RadioFreeTom⁩ https://t.co/YvyqHoZUdf

— Eugene Scott (@Eugene_Scott) November 1, 2022

Tom Nichols, conspicuously *not* a bleeding-heart sort:

… It might seem late in the game to point to any one event as a final or conclusive moment in the decline of the Republican Party. And I have no doubt that if the GOP returns to power this winter, its worst members will find new ways to appall decent people while gamboling about in jester’s bells for its base. (As my Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer has put it so well, “The cruelty is the point.”) But the reaction among Republican elected officials and their conservative-media life-support system to the beating of Paul Pelosi—by a man named David DePape, who was charged with attempting to kidnap Speaker Nancy Pelosi and admitted to planning to torture her—feels different.

… I have struggled for a few days to decide why, exactly, this moment seems like an inflection point. In terms of actual damage, January 6 was far worse than one violent crime in San Francisco. Republican leaders—and here I will leave aside Donald Trump, who is in a class of hideousness all by himself—have said far worse things over the past five years. But a parade of Republicans somehow think that an unhinged, hammer-wielding intruder putting an old man in the ICU is funny…

One might think that it would be easy for America, as one nation, to condemn an attempt to kidnap the woman second in line to the presidency that resulted in the beating of her husband with a hammer. As Ernest Hemingway would say: Pretty to think so. Instead, we have seen the dark heart of the Republican Party, with a reaction so callous, so flippantly sadistic, so hateful, that it all feels irredeemable.

The problem is that the GOP and their media footmen are flooding the zone with hate, and creating more potential DePapes every day. There is no equivalence here; it’s not liberals who are threatening election officials, stalking ballot boxes with guns, or barraging Congress’s phones and inboxes daily with threats. January 6 should have been our warning that these messages have real power, and yet that terrible day has already receded from our collective memory.

Sadistic glee in harming others is a sin (at least in my faith). But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy. If all attempts at reason and all offers of friendship fail, the rest of us should shun those whose dark hearts encourage them to revel in such poison. Unfortunately, millions of our fellow citizens seem poised to vote many such people into power. The darkness is spreading.

But Both Sides!

Here's video of Andrea Mitchell's "both sides" comment saying Republicans have been targeted by violent threats and then citing Cheney and Kinzinger, who have in fact been pilloried by *other Republicans*.https://t.co/93j3cxOuU2

— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) November 1, 2022

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), when asked why Republicans are having such a hard time condemning the violent assault on Paul Pelosi:

“Liz [Cheney] and I are not courageous. There’s no strength in this. We’re just surrounded by cowards.” pic.twitter.com/AgCsBTJ1rz

— The Recount (@therecount) November 1, 2022