Nancy, It’s Nice to Say Goodbye

Nancy Pelosi, whose two stints as speaker of the House of Representatives coincided with political acrimony, on Tuesday announced her retirement from Congress at the end of this term.

“As we go forward,” Pelosi said in her retirement message, “my message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power. We have made history. We have made progress. We have always led the way.”

Toward what?

The Burton Brothers, under whose tutelage Pelosi ascended in the California Democratic Party, pulled strings to benefit Jim Jones, who went from director of the San Francisco Housing Commission to mass murderer in faraway Guyana of so many former residents of the city. In Pelosi’s first decade in San Francisco politics, the city led the way in lunacy: the Zebra Killers shot future mayor Art Agnos, the New World Liberation Front placed a bomb on the windowsill of Dianne Feinstein’s daughter, and former supervisor Dan White murdered Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk.

More recently, San Francisco has led the way in mere statuary murder, to include such victims as Francis Scott Key, Junipero Serra, and Ulysses Grant.

San Francisco operates far outside of the mainstream. This makes it the worst place for a Democratic leader in Congress to hail from. Pelosi, the scion of a family mired in Democratic politics who married into a family mired in Democratic politics, came of age politically in the most left-wing major city in the United States. She could not deal with Republicans for the simple reason that they amounted to alien creatures to her. So, she imitated Sigourney Weaver in Alien. (RELATED: The Stock-Trade Ban That Has Democrats Squirming)

The way she exercised power greatly contributed to our toxic age. Incapable of the backslapping of Speaker Tip O’Neill or the quiet moderation of Speaker Sam Rayburn, Speaker Pelosi vilified rather than worked with the opposition.

Examples of this include petulantly tearing up Donald Trump’s speech after the 2020 State of the Union address and stacking the January 6 Committee with Democrats and Republicans committed to her desired outcome. (RELATED: Despite All the Evidence, Nancy Pelosi Is Still Lying About Jan. 6)

During her last months as speaker, after showing solidarity with one set of rioters by taking a knee while wearing a kente-cloth stole, she strangely fixated on January 6 the way Othello fixated on that handkerchief. The day surely embarrassed Republicans. But why did she not, as speaker, prepare for the worst?

“We have totally failed,” she explained during the chaos of January 6. “We have to take some responsibility for not holding the security accountable for what could have happened.”

A few weeks ago, Pelosi lost her composure when a reporter confronted her about her January 6 passivity, captured on film, ironically, by her daughter.

“Shut up,” she said. “I did not refuse the National Guard. The president didn’t send it! Why are you coming here with Republican talking points as if you’re a serious journalist?”

Last year, Pelosi publicly slammed reports of Joe Biden’s diminishing capacity a month after she had privately called the president “not the same Joe Biden” to friends.

She appeared to play the elder statesman in nudging Biden from the race. She angered the Bidens for the righteous role she played in his dropping out. She angered the Obamas by almost immediately endorsing Kamala Harris, which helped to kill any chance that the Democrats would choose their nominee with anything resembling a democratic process. “That train has left the station,” she reportedly responded to Barack Obama’s concerns.

And by playing the fixer, she inadvertently fixed it so that the Democrats could not win in 2024 by nominating a vacuous woman as uncomfortable in her own skin as the rest of us were in hearing her expropriate various regional accents. That was Pelosi’s ironic last act: delivering the White House to her nemesis, Donald Trump.

She said in her retirement announcement, “There has been no greater honor for me than to stand on the House floor and say, ‘I speak for the people of San Francisco.’”

She certainly did. And that’s a problem when your title is “Speaker of the House.”

READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn:

Halloween Came a Few Days Late for Republicans

Dems Take Away Free Food From the Snapanese at Great Political Risk

How Did We Reach a $38 Trillion Debt During a ‘Shutdown’?