Nancy Pelosi drops the hammer
I don’t know about you but I’m getting a little tired of the do-nothing Republicans. There is no sane reason for Liddle’ (whatever that means) Mitch McConnell to sit on HR3 (the House bill to lower the cost of prescription drugs), particularly after Cryin’ Donald Trump boasted during the farce known as his State of the Union Address that he would sign any such bill that crossed his desk.
The previous paragraph was brought to you by what Republicans must mean when they refer to a “dignified response.” It is the spirit of this dignified response that has been violated by Nancy Pelosi, so they claim, when she tore her copy of the SOTU in half.
Pelosi herself was asked if she thought that she stepped on her own message to her fellow House Democrats to take the high road when she tore up the speech. “No I did not,” Pelosi responded, “I tore up a manifesto of mistruths.”
What is more, she didn’t tear it up because Trump refused to shake her hand after handing her a copy of the speech, as is the time-honored tradition in this solemn occasion. She tore it up because of “HR3, infrastructure and the rest, he misrepresented all of that. [So] it was necessary to get the attention of the American people and say, ‘This is not true. This is how it affects you.’ And I don’t need any lessons from anybody – especially the president of the United States – about dignity.”
And so she does not. Long in advance of the speech, bookies gave Trump’s State of the Union good odds that it would be full of lies. The only question was how many. The average turned out to be one lie every two minutes, that is, about forty.
Pelosi’s response, to quietly tear the speech in half, was a gesture of magnificent defiance. It was Alexander’s sword cutting the Gordian knot. It was a Boston Tea Party of gestures. It was Rosa Parks refusing to relinquish her seat at the front of the bus. And it was exactly what Donald Trump and the Republicans deserve after their long and shameful legacy of deceit and hypocrisy.
Let’s never forget that Donald Trump is a sexual predator, a child rapist and a child jailer, he steals money from charities devoted to helping children who are dying of cancer, he recently bullied a 17 year old girl on Twitter. Donald Trump is human scum, and not all the ceremony, pomp or solemn occasion draped in American flags will ever change that.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.