House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is losing control of the House to upstarts Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who are much in the spotlight these days. This prevailing narrative implies major policy differences between Pelosi and the surging socialist wing of the party. Pelosi’s record suggests that assumption is highly questionable.
In 2001, nine years after Soviet archives identified Harry Bridges as a Kremlin-approved member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, Nancy Pelosi wrote in the Congressional Record that “Harry Bridges was arguably the most significant labor leader of the twentieth century,” and “beloved by the workers of this nation, and recognized as one of the most important labor leaders in the world.”
In “Pelosi’s Favorite Stalinist,” Joshua Muravchik also noted the Democrat’s enthusiasm for Vivian Hallinan, whose husband Vincent Hallinan was Bridges’ lawyer and the 1952 candidate for president of the Communist-front Progressive party. These Communist connections raised concerns about Pelosi’s trustworthiness with sensitive information.
Unlike Democrats such as Sam Nunn, Nancy Pelosi opposed Ronald Reagan’s resistance to Soviet-backed Communist insurgents in Central America and after election to Congress in 1987, she remained a stalwart of the left. In 1995 Pelosi and Rep. Ron Dellums were keynote speakers at a San Francisco conference co-sponsored by Democratic Socialists of America. The following year, the DSA endorsed the candidacy of Pelosi, who did not consider herself “a moderate.” Her leftist orthodoxy was on full display as a promoter of the Affordable Care Act.
Pelosi said Congress had to pass it before Americans found out what was in it. As they learned, the ACA was essentially demolition, a massive taking to make Americans accept only the care the government wanted them to have. For Pelosi it was “more affordability, more accessibility, better quality care for the people” and “liberty to pursue their happiness.” Obamacare, Pelosi said, allows you to quit your job and become a photographer, writer, a musician or “whatever.”
And for Pelosi, this “liberation,” was “what our founders had in mind.”
Actually, giving more power to the state is dog-eared leftist boilerplate. So no surprise that Pelosi welcomes the “enthusiasm” of the Green New Deal. And as the socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters, “Nancy Pelosi is the leader on climate change,” and “We are 100 percent in this together.” The Speaker is likewise green outside, red inside, and also rather cozy with Islamists.
In 2012 she appointed Faiz Shakir, formerly of the Harvard Islamic Society, to be her senior advisor and media director. Pelosi also headlined a fundraiser packed with Islamist groups and individuals affiliated with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. So no surprise that Speaker Pelosi rushes to the defense of Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar after her recent anti-Semitic eruption, all that business about Jews “hypnotizing the world” and invoking Allah to straighten it all out. And also that business about “the Benjamins,” and loyalty to a “foreign country.” For the Speaker, it was all a misunderstanding.
“I don’t think our colleague is anti-Semitic,” Pelosi explained at a recent event. “I think she has a different experience in the use of words, doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning that she didn’t realize.”
Rep. Omar has also ripped POTUS 44, FDR, and just about every president in recent history. For the Somali-born Muslim, they are all just as bad as President Donald Trump, the “motherfucker” that Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib wants to impeach. Anybody could be forgiven for believing that the real beef of these Muslim Democrats is with America itself, the nation that actually exists. As it happens, that would not be much of a departure from Nancy Pelosi her own self.
She believes a border wall is “immoral,” rhapsodizes about the “divine spark” of MS-13 gang members, and honored Soviet agent Harry Bridges in the Congressional Record. For contrast, consider Jeane Kirkpatrick, once a member of the Young People’s Socialist League and the first American woman to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
As the Democrat said in 1984, “The American people know better. They know that Ronald Reagan and the United States didn’t cause Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua, or the repression in Poland.” Likewise, the American people know that the United States, didn’t cause “the denial of Jewish emigration, or the brutal imprisonment of Anatoly Sharansky and Ida Nudel, or the obscene treatment of Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, or the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union.” On the other hand, Kirkpatrick said, the San Francisco Democrats, “always blame America first.”
San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi turns 79 on March 26. Rashida Tlaib is 42, Ilhan Omar 37, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only 29. If the world does not end in 12 years, as the erudite Ocasio-Cortez prophecies, Pelosi might model what this trio could look like as they approach 80. As it stands now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi differs from them only in degree, not in kind.
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