Disdain is not a platform
Is all this disgust and revulsion lobbed at the president by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi helping Democrats or the country?
The Editorial Board
Fri, 22 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT
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If he were a reader of Shakespeare, Donald Trump might call her “Lady Disdain.” For disdain is something House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has for Donald Trump in abundance.
On television this week, the speaker called the President “morbidly obese.” In other words, real fat — a fatty.
This is now the level of our politics: “You’re ugly too.”
The President, for his part, has called the speaker “sick” and unpatriotic, and he often calls his critics “losers.” His name-calling is no less childish but is more direct, visceral, and less cosmic.
He calls Joe Biden “sleepy.” He has not, so far, said the republic will perish if Sleepy Joe is elected.
The speaker’s insults are delivered with artfulness and calculation. And a certain teeth-licking relish — like a cat who has just eaten a small bird.
Defending her most recent comment she said: “I was only quoting what doctors had said about him, and I was being factual in a very sympathetic way.”
Actually doctors have not called the President morbidly obese. The speaker added the morbid part. But, sympathy? That takes the cake.
Sympathy like the kind Nurse Ratched had in ?One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
“It hurts me to do this.”
Self-canonization runs as deep as self-awareness runs dry in many of the good people of the left. Back in December a reporter asked the speaker why she hated the President. “As a Catholic I resent your using the word hate in the sentence that addresses me,” she replied. “I don’t hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is a heart full of love and always pray for the President.”
Nancy Pelosi is actually telling us that she prays for Donald Trump?
The President has told us what drug he is taking. What does the speaker think the rest of us are on?
But she also said of her statement this week that she was giving the President “a dose of his own medicine.”
Now that is an honest statement.
Rather than professing love and prayer, the speaker should give us more honesty. It would be refreshing: You, sir are fat and ugly. But even if you were not fat and ugly I would still hate you. And yes, I do hate you. Well, maybe just disdain you utterly and profoundly. There is the Catholic thing. For you, Donald Trump, are the most dangerous president in American history, an “existential threat,” the epitome and epicenter of all that is wrong with Americans, America, going back to the Pilgrims, and, maybe even the epitome of all that is bent in human nature. In the words of an old children’s book — you are simply “the worst.” Ever.
But here’s the question: Is all this disgust and revulsion helping the country? Is it helping Democrats? Will disdain cut it? For that seems to be all Ms. Pelosi and her party have. Mr. Trump is the worst. And we are not; we are good.
Mr. Trump, to be sure, has plenty of disdain of his own — for way too many people with way too little provocation. But he also has two other things, both powerful — incumbency and a message.
The mainstream media almost totally ignored it but, also this week, the President held a Cabinet meeting and he outlined his re-election pitch: While others carp, he has been fighting the virus and the numbers are coming down. Second, he is now reopening the country. Third, he will rebuild the economy by streamlining government and regulation and using his bully pulpit. And, fourth, he will keep banging away at his “America first” theme. The pandemic shows us, he said, that we have to make our own stuff, from ventilators to cars. And every part of every American car should be made in the U.S.A.
He says: I am a war president with a plan. I am no charmer, but I am working at this tough job and working for you.
Ms. Pelosi says: Don’t listen to him. He’s the worst.
Who wins that debate?
Wouldn’t an argument, a platform, and a counterplan be better?