That Same Old Song

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 06, 2026

 

Barack Obama is deeply concerned for the institutional health of the Republican Party. Indeed, whatever the current iteration of the GOP happens to be, it is, in the 44th president’s estimation, an ailing version of what preceded it.

 

Obama expressed his profound disquiet over the GOP’s constitution in a recent interview with outgoing CBS host Stephen Colbert. “When I was president, people would ask me, ‘What change would you like to see in Washington? ‘” Obama’s answer reflected his belief that the only problems in the nation’s capital were his political opponents. “I’d say, ‘I’d love a loyal opposition,” he said of the presumably disloyal Republican Party.

 

“I’d love a Republican Party that was conservative in some ways, you know, didn’t agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff, but believed in rule of law, judicial independence,” and “empirical evidence, and science, and wasn’t constantly tapping into our worst impulses,” he drawled. “And there has been a Republican Party like that in the past, and I want to see that return because I think you have to have two healthy parties.”

 

Obama always excelled at flattering himself and his allies in a manner that sounds like he’s merely offering objective analysis. But Obama merely perfected this tactic. For Democrats, the last version of the GOP, the Republican president out of power, or the late conservative lawmaker are forever better than what they have to deal with now. Take former Senator Mitt Romney.

 

“He’s the modern voice Republicans need,” said onetime Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prior to his death in 2021. “I like him.” That’s quite the turnaround from when Reid baselessly accused Romney of felony tax evasion, later explaining the lie away as an instrument of political utility. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Reid later said of his own mendacity.

 

Then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a change of heart when it came to the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. “Doesn’t Mitt Romney look good to us now? Oh my God,” she mused in 2019 as Romney contemplated a run for the U.S. Senate. “Wouldn’t it be nice if he were president of the United States?” How odd. Either the man she accused of being “kind of sexist,” a liar, and a racially hostile bigot somehow managed to burnish his reputation with the former speaker in a relatively short period, or she never meant a word of her criticisms in the first place.

 

Even Obama got in on the act. When the acute political imperative was to attack Trump, Romney served as a useful foil. “I think I was right and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job,” he told one interviewer in 2016. Trump, by contrast, was “unfit” for the office. That’s quite the reversal from four years earlier, when Obama had cast Romney as a “bullsh***er.” Obama’s running mate had said that Romney wanted to bring slavery back, and his campaign accused the GOP nominee of being guilty of negligent homicide.

 

For Democrats, the Republicans who are dead and gone are always somehow better than whatever we have today. It’s a trite political tactic that reflects less on its subjects and more on those who deploy it.

The Pol Who Wants to Replace Pelosi Makes Her Look Normal

By Will Swaim

Saturday, November 08, 2025

 

Millions of Americans who have cultivated their hatred of Nancy Pelosi for decades may soon find they actually miss her. The 85‑year‑old “Speaker Emerita” announced her retirement from Congress on Thursday, but the unfortunately named Scott  Wiener — a longtime state lawmaker from Pelosi’s California neighborhood — was already prepared to seize the day. Wiener said last month that he’d run to replace Pelosi in 2026 whether she was running or not.

 

Like a stolid Soviet leader atop Lenin’s Tomb, Pelosi had quietly signaled before her retirement announcement that she’ll likely endorse someone — maybe anyone — else to succeed her. At a recent rally for Governor Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50 redistricting effort, reporters noted that Pelosi was joined by just one local official, Connie  Chan, the San Francisco supervisor who has said she plans to run in the event of Pelosi’s now-official retirement. Another option is Pelosi’s daughter, Christine, a Democratic strategist. Christine hasn’t said she’ll run, but she would have obvious advantages in any race for any seat in any deep-blue district.

 

But whomever Pelosi endorses, she will not descend fairylike to tap the brow of Scott  Wiener.

 

It’s not that he lacks the table stakes. A sanitized, family-friendly Wiener biography would show that he’s a Harvard‑trained lawyer and longtime San Francisco resident who began his public career on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2010. There, he built his reputation as a progressive advocate on issues ranging from civil rights to public health. In 2016, San Franciscans promoted him to the California State Senate. As with Pelosi herself, the state’s government unions, especially firefighters, love Wiener.

 

But in the legislature, Wiener has established a record that might have given Pelosi a case of the fantods. Of course, Wiener’s success there is not his alone. He has operated in a political environment shaped by Governor Newsom, progressive state legislators, and a San Francisco electorate that repeatedly sends him to office.

 

But the record he’s built there is entirely his own — a made-for-Netflix tragicomic collection of utterly bonkers legislation that would almost certainly weigh on Democratic candidates everywhere, offering proof that their party cannot be trusted around children.

 

In 2019, Wiener authored SB  145: “Ending Discrimination Against LGBTQ People Regarding Sex Offender Registration.” The bill amended California’s sex offender registry law so that judges have discretion in cases involving sex between minors as young as 14 and adults within ten years of that. Wiener claimed that he was merely bringing parity to the way in which judges handled cases involving sex between straight adults and their under-18 sexual partners. He might more reasonably have simply said there should be no judicial discretion when it comes to adults, whatever their gender or self-declared “identity,” having sex with kids.

 

Wiener’s SB  107 made California a sanctuary state for kids seeking medical support for their desire to transition, regardless of where they live in the United States or what their parents say. Team Wiener says the law, which Newsom signed in 2022, protects vulnerable kids from bad parents and regressive red-state policies. You might say it violates parental rights, encourages runaways, and makes those kids vulnerable to abuse, including sex trafficking. In 2023, Wiener championed SB  407, which required foster homes to provide explicit support for LGBTQ youth and regular assessments of their putative needs.

 

But treating kids as adults — and intruding on parental rights in the process — is Wiener’s brand. His 2023 SB 866 would have lowered the age of consent for vaccine treatments to 12. Innumerate but politically astute, Wiener called that bill the “Teens Choose Vaccines Act.” When the bill stalled, Wiener raised the age of consent to 15 to attract more supporters. In one of his rare legislative defeats in sex-related legislation, Wiener pulled the bill.

 

But that same year, he cosponsored Assembly Bill 1955. Legislators called it the “Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth (SAFETY) Act.” It’s an acronym that states with precision the opposite of what’s true. In reality, AB 1955 prohibited teachers and school officials from revealing to parents their children’s requests for gender-related name, pronoun, and dress changes; their participation in sex-segregated activities; and their entry into spaces where they would otherwise be banned because of their biology. Some critics call it the “Parental Exclusion Act.” Newsom signed it anyhow and then, perhaps thinking better — but without any sense of irony — told the late Charlie Kirk that he found the idea of boys competing in girls’ sports “deeply unfair.”

 

Wiener’s zaniness isn’t limited to the stupefying theater of capitol politics. In 2022, monkeypox — a virulent, flu-like virus that spreads through physical contact — ravaged San Francisco’s gay population. The entire state of California reported 346 cases, but 64 percent of those were in San Francisco alone. Public health experts, including the CDC, begged the city to shut down its annual “Up Your Alley” gay festival. Wiener supported the call for a “state of emergency,” with all the additional funding that would bring his district. But he boldly called for everyone to keep calm and carry on with the parades, street performances, and casual sex. “Lecturing people not to have sex isn’t a public health strategy,” Wiener said. “It didn’t stop HIV — it made it worse — and won’t stop monkeypox. What will work is vaccination, testing and education.”

 

Among Wiener’s greatest legislative hits, one is suddenly in the spotlight. SB  357 (2022), Wiener’s “Safer Streets for All Act,” repealed California’s loitering-with-intent statute. Historically used to break up prostitution rings from the bottom up (no pun intended), the law has drawn national attention for producing a boom in minor sex trafficking in downtown Los  Angeles. A recent New York Times Magazine report recounted young girls walking openly on a roughly 50-block stretch of Figueroa Street, which forms a trafficking corridor nicknamed “the  Blade.” The report highlighted Wiener’s bill among several factors that boosted sex trafficking on the Blade. Wiener said SB 357 would stop police from harassing black and brown women and transgender men merely for their manner of dress or such factors as time and place and behavior.

 

“But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them,” the Times reports. “Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: ‘We run Figueroa now,’ he said.”

 

Whatever you think of Pelosi, she’s a seasoned strategist and likely considers Wiener’s record a drag on the Democratic Party’s prospects. His early announcement has forced Pelosi’s hand. Endorsing him now would tie her legacy to a polarizing figure. If vulnerability management is among a party leader’s chief considerations, Wiener comes with something like the surgeon general’s warning on a pack of smokes.

Pelosi Was Bad. What Follows Could Be Worse

National Review Online

Friday, November 07, 2025

 

Representative Nancy Pelosi, 85, announced on Thursday that she would not seek reelection in 2026, putting an end to a career in Democratic politics that goes back to Ronald Reagan’s first term.

 

Born and raised in Baltimore as the daughter of Congressman Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., she moved to California with her husband, Paul Pelosi, in 1969. As a San Francisco progressive with a pragmatic streak, Pelosi was a skilled vote-counter who was able to muscle through more left-wing policy than any Democratic legislator since LBJ.

 

Pelosi served as leader of the House Democrats from 2003 to 2023 both in the majority and minority. At the height of her power in 2009–2010 when Democrats had the White House and massive majorities in both chambers of Congress, Pelosi was instrumental in passing a blizzard of bills. Among her greatest misses were the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a gift to trial lawyers that expanded the statute of limitations for gender pay discrimination claims; the Dodd–Frank financial regulatory bill that enshrined “too big to fail,” ravaged community banks, and created the unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and a massive “cap and trade” scheme aimed at curbing carbon emissions. The latter was too radical to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate, even during the window when the party had a filibuster-proof majority.

 

While Pelosi benefitted from having a massive majority during this period, many of its members were elected in Republican-leaning districts. She had to make compromises to convince those swing-district Democrats to cast unpopular votes to advance the ideological cause while also keeping the hardened progressives from making the perfect the enemy of the good.

 

This was demonstrated more than anywhere in her 13-month crusade to pass Obamacare. To get it across the finish line, she had to abandon the idea of creating a government-run insurance plan and persuade the swing staters that once everybody found out everything that was in Obamacare, it would become popular.

 

Over time, she may have been proven correct, in that the program created a new population of dependents that Republicans were reluctant to cut off by repealing the law. Yet, in the nearer term, her leadership proved politically disastrous.

 

Democrats suffered one of the worst midterm defeats in history in 2010, losing 63 seats. Four later, the bungled rollout of Obamacare cost them even more.

 

Pelosi would return to the speakership again in 2019, where she had a significantly smaller majority that included a burgeoning socialist wing. She ended up pursuing two failed impeachments against Donald Trump. Once Joe Biden took office, despite only a cushion of a few votes, she managed to pass trillions of dollars of new spending, which exacerbated the inflation that led to Trump’s comeback.

 

While she stepped down as leader after the 2022 midterms, it was clear that she still wielded incredible power when she led the charge to pressure Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race in 2024.

 

Pelosi has been simultaneously a radical but also a moderating force within the Democratic Party. While the party of Nancy Pelosi was bad, the party of Zohran Mamdani will likely be even worse.    

On War Powers, Nancy Pelosi Is a Ridiculous Hack

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Sunday, June 22, 2025

 

Of yesterday’s attack in Iran, Nancy Pelosi says:

I wish that Pelosi wouldn’t do this. I, too, am of the view that President Trump needed congressional authorization for this strike. (For those interested, I wrote about it here, and debated Andy McCarthy on the topic here.) But my quarrel is not with Trump; it is with the entire post-WWII collection of precedents. In essence, my argument is a) that, per the terms of the Constitution — and the way in which they were understood at the time of the Founding — Congress must authorize changes in military policy; b) that Congress granted such authorizations as a matter of routine until 1950 (see: the First Barbary War, the War of 1812, the Second Barbary War, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II); and c) that, while it is now 75-years-old, the alternative arrangement that has obtained since then is illegal. My argument is not that President Trump has done something that no other recent president has done, or that he is a dictator, or that he ought to be impeached.

 

As Nancy Pelosi knows, many other Democrats have taken action that was equivalent to Trump’s attack on Iran without asking Congress for permission. Barack Obama did it in Libya (and tried to do it in Syria, until he backed down — sort of); President Clinton did it in Kosovo; President Kennedy did it in Vietnam; and Harry Truman did it in Korea. Did Nancy Pelosi condemn them? Of course not. In 2011, the Washington Post reports, Nancy Pelosi became “one of the few to publicly defend” Obama’s incursions into Libya when she contended that “the limited nature of this engagement allows the president to go forward” without Congress. When asked explicitly by reporters if she was saying that Obama did not need authorization from Congress either for the initial attack or for the ongoing operations, Pelosi said, simply, “yes.” Two years later, in the course of arguing that Barack Obama could strike Syria without Congress if he wanted to, Pelosi not only said “I don’t think that the congressional authorization is necessary,” but took the opportunity to defend President Clinton’s unilateral actions in Kosovo in 1999!

 

Today, Pelosi complains that President Trump “ignored the Constitution by unilaterally engaging our military without Congressional authorization.” Come now. If Pelosi actually believed this, she would say the same thing irrespective of who happened to be president at the time. (For anyone keeping score, here’s me doing just that in 2019, 2014, 2013.) Instead, she is expressing one of the core progressive views of government, which is that the executive branch must not be limited in its power, but that Republicans ought not to use that power if they are fortunate enough to win an election. This will not do. It cannot be the case that war-making is one of those irregular verbs from Yes, Minister: I may act without congressional authorization; you are ignoring the Constitution; he should be impeached and removed from office. The rules are the rules are the rules. There is nothing about President Trump that exempts him from the system that was used by Presidents Obama, Clinton, and others.

 

Since I published my piece on this topic, I have heard from several thoughtful people who have contended, in effect, that because 75 years have elapsed since President Truman took us into Korea without a declaration of war (or an AUMF), the arrangement he inaugurated has been “ratified.” I comprehend this case. But I do not agree with it. Perhaps this makes me a Clarence Thomas-style die-hard, but I am of the view that in this instance, as in all others, the Constitution means what it means until it is amended. It is true, I daresay, that there are many rules within our constitutional order that our politicians have ignored or subverted for long periods of time. It is not true that this deems them to have been amended. I think that conservatives ought to grasp this more widely than they perhaps do. After all, we have just celebrated the two-year anniversary of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., and the series of bad cases that had permitted racial discrimination in college admissions, and we are hoping that the Supreme Court will soon reverse Humphrey’s Executor, a decision that was handed down in 1935. In that last instance, our argument is that, sure, the federal government may have been violating the separation of powers for 90 years, but that, regardless of the longevity of that mistake, the law demands what it demands. I take the same view of the war-making power. Nancy Pelosi, alas, does not.

Nancy Pelosi Claims Pro-Palestinian Protesters Are Putin’s Stooges

By Luther Ray Abel

Sunday, January 28, 2024

 

One of the problems with a gerontocracy, besides the overuse of medication in the White House, is that long-tenured politicians become out of touch. They can become so disconnected from their base that they utter some of the looniest theories imaginable rather than accept that activists on their side can be truly nasty pieces of work. The New York Times reports that Pelosi wants the FBI to investigate pro-Palestinian protesters — Hamas sympathizers might be the more accurate term — who are harassing leading left-wing lawmakers such as Joe Manchin, Chuck Schumer, and Pelosi.

 

Kayla Guo writes for the Times:

 

Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the former House speaker, on Sunday called for the F.B.I. to investigate protesters demanding a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, suggesting without evidence that some activists may have ties to Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin.

 

“For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message,” Ms. Pelosi said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine. It’s about Putin’s message. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia.”

 

When pressed on whether she believed some of the demonstrators were “Russian plants,” Ms. Pelosi said: “Seeds or plants. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the F.B.I. to investigate that.”

 

Pelosi wants to believe — or wishes the public to believe that she believes — that Russians have infiltrated otherwise good-hearted leftists. The former House speaker provided no evidence for this. This is unfortunate for two reasons. First, there are certainly influence campaigns afoot on the American Left and, more broadly, in American cities. National Review’s Jimmy Quinn has done manful work exposing CCP efforts from San Francisco to New York and every U.S. state in between. For Pelosi, with no evidence, to sic the federal prosecutors on Americans makes it that much harder for serious investigations to take place. The excesses of McCarthyism became a tool of Communist sympathizers to delegitimize accusers. By mouthing off similarly, Pelosi kneecaps endeavors she ostensibly supports.

 

Second, the young Left is anti-Israel, and even that’s a generous characterization of their dislike for our ally. Walk through the literary dorms of progressives and one will find claims that “Israel Is a Top Student of U.S. Imperialism” from InTheseTimes; that “Joe Biden Isn’t Rescuing Hostages — He’s Enabling War Crimes” in Jacobin; and “Israel Commits Suicide of Biblical Proportions, and America Is There to Assist” from the New Republic. (I pick these three publications because I find them most representative of the views of under-30 leftists). Pelosi can either accept that her party isn’t what it was, or she can relax in delusion. She’s certainly wealthy enough to separate herself from street demonstrations, and, after all, she has spent the past eight years blaming Russia for Trump’s presidency, also with no evidence. So the precedent is there.

 

It may appear that the Democrats are ascendant as the GOP devolves further into a personality cult, but the next few years could prove more difficult for the Left than they imagine, as the old guard will more frequently have to confront the militant leftism of their younger cohort.

Now They’re Just Making Things Up

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

 

At least you can say that Nancy Pelosi is fully aware of the Democratic Party’s biggest political liabilities. What you can’t say is that she’s remotely honest in her efforts to neutralize them. So far, Pelosi’s strategy doesn’t seem to be any more sophisticated than simply insisting that her party’s candidates don’t believe the things they’ve said they believe or exhibit any of the unlovely traits they’ve previously exhibited.

 

According to Punchbowl this morning, Pelosi is endorsing former one-term representative Mondaire Jones, who lost the seat he won in 2020 due to redistricting, to face first-term Republican congressman Mike Lawler next fall in New York’s 17th district. In her endorsement, the former House speaker praised Jones’s “pragmatic leadership,” adding that he is a “stalwart supporter of Israel and champion of funding for law enforcement.” By highlighting this improbable set of accolades, Pelosi only underscored Jones’s vulnerabilities.

 

Is Mondaire Jones a stalwart supporter of local police departments and their funding? Recently, yes. But that stance conflicts with the views he expressed in 2020 when the menace of “systemic racism” was so insidious that its solutions couldn’t “just be confined to individual instances of police officers killing unarmed black and brown people.” To put an end to institutional racial bias, Jones added, “We need to end mass incarceration and legalize cannabis and defund the police.” That wasn’t a one-off. Jones repeatedly advocated “defunding the police, cutting that funding and reallocating it to social workers, and youth employment” throughout the one and only year in which a critical mass of American voters didn’t summarily reject that lunatic proposition.

 

Jones has since changed his tune. But if the former congressman underwent a conversion to law enforcement’s cause, he has yet to fill us in on his conversion narrative. A more cynical observer could be forgiven for assuming Jones’s evolving views are informed more by the self-evidently suicidal politics of the “defund” movement rather than any principle.

 

When it comes to Israeli security, the safety of America’s Jewish population, and how those two issues intersect in American politics, Jones’s record is complicated. As a congressman from New York, he became a target of what far-Left outlets euphemistically deemed the “Palestinian rights movement.” Moreover, Jones advocated the provision of security assistance to Jewish non-profit organizations and fighting antisemitism by teaching lessons about the Holocaust in elementary and secondary schools. But Jones has found himself on the defense on this issue, too.

 

In his quest to rejoin Congress, Jones joined forces with Working Families Party-endorsed assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, and the duo savaged “conservative Democrat” Representative Dan Goldman over his failure to endorse packing the Supreme Court and creating a government monopoly on health insurance in the form of “Medicare for all.” But Jones’s alliance with Niou forced him to take some ownership of Niou’s support for the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement, which targets Israeli businesses with boycotts and whose members routinely liken the Jewish State to Nazi Germany. Jones may be critical of BDS himself, but he subordinated those concerns to his immediate political interests.

 

Then there was the tweet. “Well, this was a waste of everyone’s time,” Jones posted on social media on the day Kevin McCarthy was ousted by House Democrats and eight GOP defectors. The remark captioned an image of McCarthy and Lawler wearing kippahs while taking a meeting with a variety of visibly Jewish Hasidic community leaders in Rockland County. Initially, Jones defended the tweet and its bizarre implications. “As I stated in my tweet, Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly wasted the time of Hasidic leaders in the Lower Hudson Valley,” he maintained. But no one was buying it, including Jones’s fellow Democrats.

 

“This disgusting post is insulting to Jewish people and every person of faith,” said New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer. “It is never a waste of time to meet with religious leaders,” Florida representative Jared Moskowitz agreed. “This disgusting post is insulting to Jewish people and every person of faith.” Eventually, Jones felt compelled to take down the post and issue an apology. “I am proud of my record of combating antisemitism in Congress and after Congress,” the former congressman pleaded. “In a time of rising antisemitism, we must be crystal clear where we stand: I continue to be a strong ally of our diverse Jewish communities.”

 

Jones’s record demonstrates the tension between progressives and the vast majority of American voters. If Jones’s impulses are to oppose antisemitism wherever it emerges and to support law enforcement, he has found it within himself to stifle those instincts when he feels it’s necessary. The former congressman’s record reveals the extent to which appealing to modern progressives requires supplicating before a variety of antisocial views and politically toxic policy preferences. The Lower Hudson Valley can do better.

The Herculean Labor of Praising Kamala Harris with a Straight Face

By Dan McLaughlin

Thursday, September 14, 2023

 

Members of political parties have an obligation to be team players. That obligation shouldn’t be unlimited, but people who make their way to the position of leading a legislative caucus have typically internalized the idea of putting the team first to a point where they have to say things with a straight face that would impinge deeply on the self-respect of normal humans. It takes a lot to get someone like Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, or Paul Ryan to speak ill of other leaders of their own party with more than the gentlest rebukes.

 

So it is telling that Pelosi sounded as if she were getting a tooth pulled when Anderson Cooper of CNN — hardly a hostile questioner — tried to pin her down on whether Kamala Harris is the best person to be Joe Biden’s vice president and 2024 running mate:

 

“He thinks so, and that’s what matters,” Pelosi responded. That prompted Cooper to press Pelosi on whether she “thought so.” Pelosi again declined to say if she thought Harris was Biden’s best running mate, but instead pivoted, calling the vice president “very politically astute.” “I don’t think people give her enough credit,” Pelosi said. “People don’t understand, she’s politically astute. Why would she be vice president if she were not?”

 

Pelosi only mustered a lukewarm response to Cooper’s question. “She’s the vice president of the United States. So, when people say to me, ‘Well, why isn’t she doing this or that?’ I said, because she’s the vice president.” “That’s the job description. You don’t do that much. You know?”

 

“She must be good at the job or she wouldn’t have the job” is about the faintest praise it is possible to muster. If Pelosi were younger, one might be tempted to attribute this to the sorts of jealousies that frequently arise among major figures who share the same state party and the same city, but Pelosi’s been in Washington since 1986, and had already risen to speaker of the House eight years before Harris was first elected to the Senate, when Pelosi was in her mid 70s. Pelosi has never been under serious consideration for any major office outside the House; being speaker was her highest ambition. So, while Pelosi may well have reasons to dislike or disdain Harris that derive from things Pelosi knows from San Francisco politics, it is unlikely that she has ever seen her as a rival. There was an earlier time when Pelosi went out of her way to aid Harris’s rise in politics, endorsing her in the 2010 Democratic primary for California attorney general and putting her name on a profile of Harris in the TIME 100 in 2013. (Granted, when you read that profile today, it is notably unspecific in attributing to Harris any virtues.)

 

In short, if Nancy Pelosi is unenthused about Kamala Harris today, it is likely as a result of having seen her in action since her arrival in Washington, her 2019 presidential campaign, and her service as vice president. At Pelosi’s age, with her now being unburdened of caucus leadership, she no longer feels the need to muster more enthusiasm than the barest minimum. That barest minimum is what she gave Anderson’s audience. Praise so faint is damning indeed.

Nancy Pelosi’s Sudden Conversion Experience

By Jeffrey Blehar

Monday, June 26, 2023

 

What I value most about MSNBC’s new lineup is the ability of its hosts to do hard-hitting interviews with adverse guests. No Fox News–like softballs here; instead we get former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki interviewing former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the results are every bit as explosively contentious as you would expect from two people who have been blowing kisses to one another over an explicitly shared political agenda for the last several years. (I assume it was not Psaki’s bona fides as a commentator wot got her the job as the Biden administration’s mouthpiece.)

 

Among the hard questions Psaki put to Pelosi: Just how disappointed is she in this conservative Supreme Court? (“Are you concerned the Supreme Court has lost its legitimacy?” she boldly challenged her.) But I’m not really here for media critique today and besides, the shameless by definition cannot be shamed. Instead I’m here because Nancy Pelosi’s lengthy response to that creampuff was a farrago of lies, cynical politicking, and howling personal hypocrisy notable even for her. When she wasn’t gleefully throwing gasoline onto the fire by saying that in her opinion “30% is high” as the Supreme Court’s proper approval rating, she was seeking to casually revise the U.S. Constitution: “But there certainly should be term limits, and if nothing else there should be ethical rules that should be followed.”

 

First of all, to revisit a point that has likely already been made a hundred times before at National Review: Even if you foolishly think there should be term limits for the Supreme Court, the Founders did not, and they have tied your hands here decisively. Article III, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states clearly that “the Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” In other words, all federal judges hold life tenure unless impeached. Impeachment is how “good Behaviour” is enforced — even judges who have been convicted of felonies and sent to prison have to be formally impeached by the House and removed by the Senate.

 

It is true that practitioners and legal observers often grumble about elderly judges who refuse to take retirement despite clearly no longer being able to properly shoulder the work; few still remember William O. Douglas’s shameful final years on the Court. But life tenure means life tenure, and if you want to change that you need either to muster a bare majority in the House and two-thirds of the Senate or to pass a 28th amendment to the Constitution. (Or stage a revolution. I’d be curious as to which option Pelosi prefers, because it is increasingly difficult not to suspect that many on the activist left prefer the third one.)

 

But there was something even more risible about Pelosi’s sanctimony when it came to term limits: If there’s anyone who should be sympathetic to the idea of life tenure in office, surely it is Nancy Pelosi. This is a woman who took her House seat during the Reagan administration as the handpicked successor of her district’s previous representative, spent the next 36 years accumulating power and gaining, losing, and regaining the speakership, and finally handpicked her own successor before stepping down. So either she is the world’s biggest hypocrite, or she hasn’t gotten over the fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg did a world-historically terrible job of timing her retirement. (Readers are already asking: “Why not both?”)

 

Finally, Pelosi is probably one of the worst people to go around preaching about ethics standards to anyone right now. I qualify with “probably” because I suppose a lecture from Hillary Clinton on the subject would be more obnoxious, but in that case there’s at least a chance she might be in on the joke. Meanwhile Pelosi was recently embroiled in a potential insider-trading stock-dump mess the precise outrage of which is that, even if proven, it might be legal, owing to lax House ethics rules Pelosi was certainly in no hurry to revise or update or strengthen herself.

 

Nancy Pelosi, in both the minority and the twilight of her career, is inclined to grandiosity; it is a typical consolation for waning power. But the rest of us are not required to treat her opinions like anything but self-serving garbage. Her sudden adoption of virtues she herself notoriously lacked throughout her four-decade career reminds one of a pagan king’s deathbed conversion to Christianity just in case. One imagines Pelosi is familiar with St. Augustine’s ironic prayer as a wild youth: “Give me chastity and temperance — but not yet!” Since I’m an open-minded man, I’d like to believe Nancy Pelosi’s conversion, at age 83, to term limits and ethical propriety is sincere; it’s a shame it took an entire political career for her to suddenly get there.

Scraping Advantage Off a Crime Scene Floor

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 31, 2022

 

There’s a terrible rhythm to how we react to episodes of violence with a political dimension. Paul Pelosi’s brutal assault is no different.

 

Targeted, premeditated attacks like this one, we soon learn, are cooked up in an addled mind, but something as unsatisfying as madness fails to suffice for a motive. So, we go about the flawed human practice of seeking patterns and applying rationality to the irrational. In this ritual, we exercise the agency chaos has otherwise stolen, even if it usually manifests in the unconstructive practice of assigning blame for violence to the non-violent.

 

From what we know of Paul Pelosi’s alleged attacker, the preponderance of evidence indicates that he was a sick man. The paranoia to which he was attracted of late has an unmistakably rightwing flavor. He seems enticed by the collection of lunatic conspiracy theories espoused by disciples of “QAnon,” which the Associated Press summarizes as “the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles, and baby-eating cannibals.” This was, however, a recent conversion. His neighbors describe the alleged assailant as a transient drug addict, well-known around infamously left-wing Berkeley, California as a pro-nudity activist and a “hemp jewelry maker.” His online activities include a variety of anti-Semitic themes, which is a common feature of the psychologically deranged, whatever their politics.

 

This presents a maddening conundrum. When America’s mental-health crisis is discussed at all, it is either an intractable Gordian Knot or another example of how America just won’t throw enough money at its problems. Irresponsible conspiracy peddlers in media and politics display no sense of accountability. They’re not listening to these admonitions, nor are their audiences. The only people listening to reason, in fact, are the reasonable. So, that’s who you must train your fire on.

 

In Politico, reporters Sarah Ferris and Jeremy White point an accusatory finger at Republican ad makers, who may have contributed to the violent mania exhibited by Pelosi’s alleged assailant by crafting messages critical of the Democratic Speaker of the House in an election year. The article notes that Republican committees and candidates have used Pelosi as a foil for well over a decade—a fact the reporters believe supports rather than disputes the notion that this year’s fare crossed a line.

 

“The attack on Paul Pelosi is becoming the latest inflection point in an American political discourse that’s grown exponentially coarser since Republicans first embraced Nancy Pelosi as an attack-ad bogeywoman,” Politico asserted. The Democratic lawmakers the outlet quotes place the blame at the feet of Donald Trump and the Republican political “machine,” which “led directly to this attack.” The president himself echoed these sentiments within hours of the attack on Pelosi.

 

This attempt at advantage-seeking in the wake of this episode of violence is as familiar as it is sordid. It’s precisely what the New York Times editorial board engaged in when it alleged that a paranoid schizophrenic with a deluded grudge against English grammar shot Rep. Gabby Giffords because Sarah Palin’s PAC placed “Democrats under stylized cross hairs.” It’s of a piece with the efforts to establish a causal relationship between “martial metaphors” and attempted murder. That is a source of psychological comfort, insofar as those are things that are at least theoretically within our control. As a bonus, it is also a tool of political utility.

 

It would be nice if we had a more responsible political class (though the dominant figures in 2010 were more responsible by any definition, and that didn’t stop the commentariat from blaming everyone but the violent for their violence). There was no time in American history when our politics were unsullied by notions that a secret cabal is plotting against the public interest, but it would be great if American political life weren’t as conspiratorial as it is today. We know that radical notions can radicalize the disturbed, and we’ve seen a lot of radicalizations recently; only some of them right-wing.

 

The would-be gunman who was charged with the attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanaugh was moved to violence by apocalyptic rhetoric around the Court’s rulings on abortion and gun rights. But that episode was “not especially hair-raising,” and it inspired no soul-searching.

 

When one of Marco Rubio’s campaign canvassers was beaten to the point of hospitalization, reportedly, “because he was a Republican,” Florida Democrats said the staffer’s history was perhaps behind the attack. He was “a misogynist and a racist,” a “white supremacist,” someone with a “history of being tied to hatred and bigotry,” and who should be “condemned” by the campaign that hired him.

 

The man who almost killed a number of Republican members of Congress in 2017 populated his social-media accounts with eschatology that Donald Trump’s presidency would supposedly fulfill. In 2020, American cities burned over the conspiratorial notion that the United States is founded in evil and remains wholly dedicated to the subjugation of its minority population. This year, dozens of pro-life pregnancy centers have been targeted with violence over the notion that their “campaign of oppression” is an existential threat.

 

Some of these conspiracy theories are more fashionable than others, but they are all poison. We should demand more seriousness and sobriety from our representatives. But even if a better politics were bestowed upon us tomorrow, it wouldn’t rid us of the violently mentally disturbed. It would, however, prevent our political actors from leveraging acts of violence to squeeze out whatever political rewards bloodshed provides the unscrupulous. As the attack on Paul Pelosi suggests, we’re a long way off from that.

The Stagflation President

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, October 15, 2022

 

Another month, another bad report. On October 13, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that consumer price inflation, at an 8.2 percent annualized rate, was higher than expected through September. Americans continue to endure the worst inflation in four decades. They continue to experience a decline in real average hourly earnings. They continue to tell pollsters that the economic recession has arrived. Blerina Uruci, an economist at T. Rowe Price, does not like what she sees. “This is very troubling,” Uruci told the New York Times. “The trend is very troubling.”

 

Not at the White House. It doesn’t see any troubles. According to President Biden, the most recent BLS data are superfluous. After all, everybody already knows that “Americans are squeezed by the cost of living: that’s been true for years, and they didn’t need today’s report to tell them that.” As a matter of fact, Biden said in a statement, rising costs are “a key reason I ran for President.” And anyway, the situation is under control. “My policies — that Democrats delivered — directly tackles [sic] price pressures we saw in today’s report.”

 

End of story, thank you all very much, nothing to see here, move along, move along.

 

Just a minute. Biden’s reading of recent economic history is filled with evasions, half-truths, and “yarns.” They deserve comment and rebuttal. I don’t remember Biden staking his 2020 candidacy on inflation. He couldn’t have. The inflation hadn’t happened. It didn’t arrive until the spring of 2021. By which time Biden was living — during weekdays, at least — at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

 

Nor do I recall Biden warning the country about the coming threat of rising prices. To the contrary: Varsity Joe was captain of “Team Transitory.” The “temporary” inflation would subside, he and his teammates argued, as kinks in the supply chain got worked out and the Federal Reserve tightened the money supply.

 

They were wrong, of course. Inflation persisted. By the winter of 2022, Biden was blaming high prices on corporate greed and “Putin’s price hike.” Now he says inflation is the fault of the opposition party. No reason is provided; this president isn’t into causality. “If Republicans take control of Congress,” Biden warns, “everyday costs will go up — not down.”

 

It’s unlikely that voters see things the same way. At the least, a Republican Congress will check Biden’s big-spending instincts for the next two years. And most people draw a straight line between Biden’s policies and the parlous state of the economy. Indeed, one eminent Democrat, former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, drew such a line before Biden’s policies ever became law.

 

The American Rescue Plan Act, Summers famously observed in February 2021, was much larger than it needed to be. If combined with the trillions in pandemic-related emergency spending from 2020, Summers said, the plan would result in inflation. The White House dismissed him. The act passed Congress on a party-line vote. Biden signed it into law on March 11, 2021. Inflation spiked that April.

 

Biden was just getting started. On top of the $5 trillion regular budget, new spending included the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($550 billion) and the CHIPS and Science Act ($250 billion). Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) whittled the ambitious and partisan Build Back Better plan down to the ridiculously named — but just as partisan — Inflation Reduction Act ($740 billion). Economists at the Penn Wharton School estimated the Inflation Reduction Act’s effect. “The impact on inflation,” they concluded, “is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

 

Not long after Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, he issued a constitutionally dubious executive order forgiving college debt. It will increase the government’s cost of student loans by an estimated $400 billion. Meanwhile, to lower gasoline prices ahead of the midterm election, he drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its lowest level in 40 years. Now the returns on that strategy are diminishing. The cost of gasoline is rising once again. Is this a chance to deregulate domestic energy production and build more refineries? That would be a serious response. Instead, Biden threatens reprisals against OPEC+ and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

 

The economy shrank during the first half of 2022. In March, the Federal Reserve began ratcheting up interest rates to squash inflation. The hikes haven’t resulted in price stability. But they have led to the highest mortgage rates in 20 years, growing volatility in debt markets, and the increasing likelihood of a prolonged recession and financial crisis. National Economic Council director Brian Deese likes to say that the U.S. economy is “in a period of transition.” The transition is from bad to worse.

 

By subsidizing demand while restricting supply, President Biden has revived the economic maladies that afflicted the American economy when he entered public life a half century ago. Biden has turned gold into dross and, amazingly, expects to be rewarded for it. “The president and I were talking at lunch today about this,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a recent interview with the Nation magazine. “We are so proud—and I hope I don’t give off any bravado in saying this—but we are so proud that we will end up being the most pro-labor administration probably ever.”

 

Sorry, madame vice president, but your bravado is showing. The unions might be happy. The other 90 percent of the workforce is not. Expect to hear from them in November.

We Have All the Power We Need on the World Stage

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, August 04, 2022

 

‘Don’t put on a show of power if you don’t have the power.” That was one of many similar sentiments expressed by Chinese nationalists infuriated that the Beijing junta did not undertake some extraordinary effort — such as the deployment of military force — to stop Nancy Pelosi from visiting Taiwan.

 

“Don’t put on a show of power if you don’t have the power” is excellent advice. Even better advice is: “Don’t put on a show of power even if you do have the power.” If you have the power, everybody who needs to know knows.

 

Why go to Taiwan? Pelosi is not the first speaker of the House to visit the republic, though she is the first speaker — and the highest-ranking U.S. official — to do so since Newt Gingrich paid a visit to Taipei in the 1990s. The United States has long maintained an official policy of “strategic ambiguity” vis-à-vis Taiwan — a dangerous fiction, in my view — with Washington notionally in agreement with Beijing’s view that there is “One China.”

 

So, why stir it up this summer?

 

One excellent reason for Pelosi to go to Taiwan is because Beijing tried to tell her that she couldn’t. Whatever theoretical consent the United States has given to the “One China” myth, the fact is that Taiwan is, and long has been, an independent, self-governing country. The United States also is an independent, self-governing country, and Xi Jinping has just been shown that he does not have the juice to tell officials of the U.S. government where they may and may not go — “Don’t put on a show of power if you don’t have the power.”

 

It doesn’t hurt to remind Beijing of that every now and then. We could perform a bunch of high-profile military exercises in the region or stage one of those nifty look-at-the-size-of-my-missile parades that figures such as Xi and Kim Jong-un are so fond of. But, instead, we sent an 82-year-old legislator — one who has been, to her credit, an energetic critic of Beijing’s human-rights record. The United States doesn’t have to whip out the artillery to remind everybody we have it. And, besides, we have something more powerful than nuclear weapons in our arsenal: an open society. Nancy Pelosi is, in her daft and corrupt way, as ready an exemplar of that as anybody.

 

While Xi was having his little hissy-fit about Pelosi’s itinerary, Vladimir Putin was raising a ruckus about NATO’s decision to admit Sweden and Finland as new members, a decision just ratified by a nearly unanimous Senate, the only opposition coming from that cretinous sycophant from Missouri. (The disappointment from Kentucky voted “present.”) Moscow has threatened “retaliatory steps” in response to the NATO expansion.

 

Like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin believes — and is encouraged by some of his American admirers to believe — that he has veto power over the actions, alliances, and relationships of other countries. The Senate has answered him: “Don’t put on a show of power if you don’t have the power.” Putin may be willing to bomb maternity hospitals in Ukraine, but that is not power — that is only brutality. Conflating power and brutality is a common error among a certain kind of thug and thug-groupie — Xi, Putin, Kim, Muhammad bin Salman, Daniel Ortega, Donald Trump — but brutality is the mark of a weak regime rather than a powerful one. Powerful countries have enduring institutions, influence, and the power of attraction that you can see in the millions of people risking their lives for a chance to live in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Australia, etc.

 

You cannot build anything worth having out of brutality. No doubt the average mugger in New York City would beat the stuffing out of the average Fortune 500 CEO in a street fight, but if you think that means the nobody street hoodlum has power, then you don’t know what power is.

 

Whether through expanding NATO or by Republicans’ backing Pelosi as a representative of the country rather than her party, it is good to see Americans take their own side in a fight from time to time. And if you don’t think there is an American side to Putin’s war on Ukraine or Xi’s threatened war on Taiwan, you aren’t paying attention.

 

“Don’t put on a show of power if you don’t have the power.” We have plenty of power — as much of it as we are willing to deploy. What we don’t always have is a good understanding of what we want to get out of using that power. While the baby steps taken by Pelosi and the Senate are welcome, the fact remains that the United States isn’t getting what it wants out of its relationship with China or its relationship with Russia not because Washington doesn’t have sufficient power but because Washington does not understand what it wants or what it should want out of those relationships.

 

If Joe Biden needs someone to help explain that to him, Taipei is only an overnight flight away.

Pelosi Stands Up to the Bully in Beijing

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, August 01, 2022

 

As of this writing, it appears House speaker Nancy Pelosi will travel to Taiwan, based on statements from unnamed U.S. and Taiwanese officials. But it is not confirmed.

 

Conservatives rarely applaud Pelosi, but her willingness to visit Taiwan — and to tell the Chinese government in Beijing to go pound sand if it doesn’t like her making the trip — is one of those rare times when they do. As the editors of National Review put it:

 

Much as we disagree with the speaker on most issues, on this question she has been stalwart. Pelosi, by making this trip against the background of Chinese threats, would do a service to her country, Taiwan, and all nations with an interest in resisting a totalitarian party-state’s military aggression. She must go to Taiwan.

 

With some of the more hyperactive Chinese state-media propagandists talking up the possibility of the Chinese military shooting down her flight and the Chinese military promising live-fire exercises near the coast, Pelosi is demonstrating courage and accepting a certain amount of risk to life and limb by making the trip. The chances of the Chinese military deliberately or accidentally shooting down her flight are not high . . . but they are not zero, either.

 

Pelosi sees herself as “a progressive hawk” on China; in recent days, people dug into the archives and found footage of her trip to China in 1991, two years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, when students and protesters in Beijing were crushed by the Chinese government. Pelosi and other members of Congress visited Tiananmen Square and displayed a banner honoring the demonstrators — until Beijing police showed up, hassling them and the media traveling with them. Back in the day, Pelosi opposed giving China most-favored-nation trade status, calling it “a nation that proliferates weapons of mass destruction, maintains trade barriers that bar U.S. products from its market, and continues to arrest, detain, exile or harass those who peacefully express their political or religious beliefs in China and Tibet.”

 

We discussed Pelosi’s trip on The Editors podcast last week, and I can see the argument from Allahpundit that what the U.S. could gain from a Pelosi visit is minuscule compared to the costs of this escalating into some sort of military skirmish.

 

But once the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives says she’s going to Taiwan, and the Chinese government demands that she cancel the visit, the speaker must go to Taiwan. Otherwise, backing down communicates to China that if it rattle the saber enough, it can veto what our political leaders do. What happens when China demands that no other American officials travel to Taiwan? What happens when Beijing demands that the U.S. shut down our de facto embassy, the American Institute in Taiwan, or demands an end to commercial air travel between the U.S. and Taiwan? At what point do we say, “Sorry, pal, but we’re a sovereign country and we make our own decisions”?

 

If Pelosi doesn’t go, then the United States will have backed down from a bully, and bullies are rarely satiated by one victory.

 

Many people in politics like to think of themselves as the noble, brave, and righteous types who are willing to stand up to a bully — and obviously, few people in politics think of themselves as bullies. But there’s the key question of which bully a person chooses to oppose. Some of the forces on the globe that seem most indisputable bullies are not always treated as such.

 

The Chinese government is obviously a bully, but not every American wants to stand up to Xi Jinping, because a lot of economically and socially powerful Americans have a lot of money at stake in a continued partnership with China. Corporate America’s quick, sweeping moves in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine offered a strange contrast to the way corporate America rarely if ever uttered a critical word about the government of China, despite its ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs, its human-rights abuses, its oppression of Hong Kong, its threats toward Taiwan, etc.

 

Actor John Cena plays a lot of tough-guy characters who stand up to bullies. But when push came to shove, he was very eager to apologize and mollify the bully that is the Chinese government. NBA star LeBron James shares anti-bullying public-service announcements, but when push came to shove, he didn’t want anyone in the NBA upsetting anyone in the Chinese government by tweeting, “stand with Hong Kong.”

 

We’re all anti-bullying . . . unless we’ve got a few billion dollars at stake in the bully’s consumer market. Then, all of a sudden, standing up to a bully gets complicated.

 

I mentioned Russia a few paragraphs ago. The Biden administration would argue that right now, it’s standing up to Vladimir Putin. The problem is that one of the reasons Putin is the threat that he is today is because there was no sufficiently consequential U.S. response to the occupation of Crimea, the aggression in the Donbas, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 being shot down by Russian-backed forces, and other acts of belligerence. Sure, Biden says he wants to stand up to the bully now. But if he and Barack Obama and their teams had done so around, say, spring 2014, the world might not be in the mess it is in today.

 

Everybody says they want to stand up to Vladimir Putin now. But even here, there’s odd foot-dragging and half-measures, and a sense that the U.S. government’s heart really isn’t in it. A week ago, senior U.S. officials said they were considering whether to provide Ukraine with new fighter jets and the training needed to operate them. But back in March, the administration vetoed the transfer of Polish MiGs to Ukraine. (Those are the planes that Ukrainian pilots actually know how to fly.) If we’re going to send jets, why did we wait five months? Why would we send them jets that they need to be trained on, instead of the ones they can deploy comparably quickly?

 

For that matter, what was the point of making those early concessions to Russia on Gazprom 2? Why did the administration try to eliminate weapons systems whose primary purpose is to deter Russia from using battlefield nukes? Why is the administration insisting we keep a tax treaty with Russia in place? Why are we going ahead with trading Viktor Bout for Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan? If we’re standing up to the bully, why are we also trying to placate him?

 

Does anyone want to dispute that the Iranian regime is a bully, both to its own citizens and dissidents, and to its neighbors in the region? And yet, the Biden administration has spent a year and a half begging it to come back to the negotiating table. This administration has also sent out social-media messages in Farsi declaring, “Racism exists in America. Xenophobia exists in America. Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia.” (Because if there’s any group of people on Earth who vehemently oppose antisemitism, it’s the Iranian mullahs, right?) If we’re standing up to the bully, why are we also trying to make a deal with him?

 

Some Americans would argue — with some compelling evidence — that the Saudi Royal family is a bunch of bullies. And at one point, Biden made it clear that he was going to make that regime a pariah for its bullying. He tried some half-measures for a while, and then, once oil prices got high enough, the Saudis got a presidential fist bump. And corporate America’s willingness to embrace rainbows for Pride Month everywhere except the Middle East is a glaring demonstration of how its willingness to stand for values is highly dependent upon conditions.

 

Is that standing up to the bully?

 

Mind you, the list above consists of autocratic and despotic regimes that commit horrible human-rights abuses with impunity. China, Russia, and Iran would like to see America weakened and helpless; the Saudis would like to see us taken down a peg, but not so much that we can’t afford to keep paying top dollar for their oil. You would like to think that Americans, left, right, and center, could all agree that these regimes and their enforcers are the bad guys, indisputable bullies, and the sort of thugs we ought to stand up against — not through outright war, but through the application of the full spectrum of geopolitical leverage.

 

We have bullies at home in the U.S., too, but your least favorite political figure isn’t nearly as much of a potential problem as Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or Ayatollah Khameni. Your least favorite political figure can get voted out of office; they don’t command armies, navies, spies, hackers, and off-the-books assassination squads.

 

Your least favorite political figures, cable-news hosts, talking heads, celebrities, and social-media influencers are capable of being bullies. But they’re bullies on a smaller scale and represent a different kind of threat than these overseas bruisers. They’re not capable of, say, attempting genocide the way Putin is right now.

 

Ask a progressive who’s a bully, and they’re likely to say Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, the GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices, Mitch McConnell, evangelical Christians, gun owners, etc. Ask a conservative who’s a bully, and they’re likely to say the biggest voices in the mainstream media, the insufferable scolds in Hollywood, the woke mobs in academia, Anthony Fauci and an unaccountable public-health apparatus, mayors such as Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, etc.

 

Ask a conservative who the bullying forces in American life are, and they’re likely to say big tech companies, because they censor voices on the right. Ask a progressive who the bullying forces in American life are, and they’re likely to say big tech companies, because they don’t censor voices on the right enough.

 

I suspect some American leaders choose to pick fights with convenient not-so-strong foes at home because they don’t know what to do with those inconvenient strong foes abroad. You can’t cancel Vladimir Putin, you can’t “deplatform” Xi Jinping — heck, in some cases, he may effectively own the platform — and you can’t shame the Iranian mullahs.