By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, September 03, 2020
Nancy Pelosi has great hair.
Say what you will about the 80-year-old speaker of the
House — that she is a cynical crackpot, a content-free culpably vicious
partisan hack, the kind of ward-heeler who gives ward-heelers a bad name — her
hair is perfect, like that werewolf drinking piña coladas at Trader Vic’s.
But nothing great comes without a cost.
Madame Speaker is in an embarrassing position. In San
Francisco, where her nominal constituency is located, it currently is illegal
for hair salons to offer services indoors, owing to the epidemic. But members
of the nomenklatura are entitled to their petty privileges: Bernie
Sanders has his lakeside dacha, where he retires to practice his jeremiads
against economic inequality, and Nancy Pelosi has her hair appointment.
The salon in question is closed, officially. It has to
be. But the stylists who work in such salons are usually independent operators
who simply rent a chair from the salon owner, who is more of a landlord than a
cosmetological entrepreneur as such. Representative Pelosi was caught on camera
getting serviced indoors, and — angels and ministers of grace defend us! —
going about her beauty business without a mask.
Pelosi is not the first politician to have a sacrosanct
tonsorial engagement. Bill Clinton as president famously sat on Air Force One
at LAX getting a $200 trim — “the most famous haircut since Samson’s,” the Washington
Post called it. Clinton being Clinton, there were rumors at the time that
it wasn’t a haircut that the president was getting. You never knew with that guy.
Texas governor Ann Richards had a very famous hairdo, and
staff interrupted her regular hair appointments at their peril. Thanks in part
to the work of some of my college-newspaper colleagues in Austin, a story broke
that the governor’s protégé had lied on her résumé: She had not, as claimed,
graduated from the University of Texas and — particularly embarrassing for a
former member of the legislature who presented herself as an expert on Hispanic
issues — she had failed courses in Mexican-American studies and the history of
the Texas legislature. (She had also claimed to have been Phi Beta Kappa, an
honor for which she, as a journalism major, was ineligible.) The governor had
to be informed during her hair appointment, and her response, I was told at the
time, was: “Somebody get that f*****g
bitch on the phone!”
You’re always the bitch when you get in the way of a
politician — or a “bimbo” or trailer trash, if the politician in question is a
Clinton.
Pelosi protests that she was “set up” by the salon owner.
There is nothing new in politics: Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, caught
on film smoking crack in a hotel room with a hooker, raged over and over again:
“The bitch set me up! The bitch set me
up! The bitch set me up!” That didn’t play as well in the courtroom as
he might have hoped, but, being a Democrat in the District of Columbia, he was
reelected after serving his time.
Pelosi is demanding an apology from the salon owner for
allegedly setting her up. It takes a special kind of chutzpah to do something
obviously sketchy and then demand an apology for being exposed. But here, too,
there is precedent. When young Barack Obama was first running for president, he
was criticized for belonging to the congregation of the Reverend Jeremiah
Wright, who preached crackpot racist sermons from his pulpit. A lesser
politician might have tried to wiggle around some, but Barack Obama’s political
instincts are almost as on-point as Nancy Pelosi’s hair. Embarrassed by his own
association with a vicious racist, Obama went on television and lectured the
rest of the country on their supposed racism. This was an elevated
version of “I know you are, but what am I?” and — damnably — it worked.
Little scandals often matter more than big scandals. The
Obama administration’s IRS abuses and related shenanigans, which went almost
nowhere as a scandal, were in substance more corrosive than the relatively
minor check-kiting scandal that rocked Congress back in the 1990s. Donald Trump
may have led audiences in chanting “Lock her up!” but it is an obscure
Democrat-run prosecutor’s office in Texas that has in fact corruptly indicted
major political figures (Tom DeLay, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Rick Perry) on
laughably trumped-up felony charges, only to see them thrown out. Back in the
1990s, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s dodgy cattle-futures profits spoke to a much
more serious kind of corruption than did Bill Clinton’s intern-bothering. But
most people who are not members of the Ayn Rand Society know what sex is, and
nobody gets futures trading. Try explaining it to Joe Voter and see how far you
get before he’s lost in Drake’s latest Instagram post. On the other hand,
relatively minor scandals that are easily comprehended can be major problems.
The most easily comprehended of such scandals is the scandal of hypocrisy,
which is what Nancy Pelosi is guilty of.
There are worse things than hypocrisy, and Pelosi will
brazen through this. She has a pretty good poker face to go along with the
first-rate hair.
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