Poor Nancy Pelosi. Is there nothing she can do to win over the radicals in her own party?
Even after House Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) came to the defense of the “squad” against Trump’s “go back” comments, the four congresswomen still won’t let their feud with Pelosi go. In an interview with CBS’ Gayle King on Wednesday, the lawmakers again accused Pelosi of singling them out and blamed the party leader for threats of violence against them.
Pelosi snubbed by the “Squad” again
It must be heartbreaking — cue the world’s tiniest violin — for Pelosi, the stereotypical California liberal, to be so publicly rejected by her own ideological progeny. For years, Pelosi was a walking Republican attack ad. The Democrat has dedicated decades of her life to fighting for the left.
At 79-years-old, the Democratic matriarch is being upstaged by freshmen lawmakers who don’t know their way around Washington, and who don’t seem to have any respect for the San Francisco liberal who spent decades there. Ever since January, when this new caucus of extreme radical progressives rose to power, Pelosi has struggled to keep the peace as her leftism became the new “moderate” progressivism, at least compared with the anti-Israel, open borders, infanticidal insanity of the democratic socialist “squad.”
The differences between Pelosi’s “moderate” Girondins and the party Jacobins were clearer than ever in the King interview, which aired Wednesday. Even after Trump all but sent Democrats circling the wagons around the squad with his “go back” tweets, the four lawmakers didn’t seem to care that Pelosi came to their defense when she hit back at Trump’s “xenophobia.” Though they claimed there is no “fracture” in the party, they doubled down on the accusations of racism against Pelosi that started their whole feud last week, before Trump poured fuel on the fire.
King asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) if she was in contact with Pelosi, and the response was curt, to say the least.
“Our teams are in communication,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) took it up a notch by warning Pelosi against “singling out” the four women of color and accused the party leader of encouraging death threats against them. “Acknowledge the fact that we are women of color, so when you do single us out, be aware of that and what you’re doing, especially because some of us are getting death threats, because some of us are being singled out because of our backgrounds, because of our experiences and so forth,” she said.
The Revolution eats itself
Members of the outspoken and social-media savvy “squad” have complained of receiving threats of violence, and especially after Trump attacked them on Sunday, telling them to “go back” to their countries of origin. Only one of the four women, Ilhan Omar (D-MN), was born outside the United States.
Some speculated that Trump’s tweets were encouraged by the increasingly public drama between Pelosi and the “squad,” which started when Pelosi dismissed their influence after they voted against a House border funding bill. Pelosi chastised progressives who compared moderate Democrats to segregationists for ultimately voting to pass a more conservative border bill. The party leader told Democrats to “come to me” if they have a problem, rather than air their grievances on Twitter. That prompted Ocasio-Cortez to accuse Pelosi of “singling out” the four women because of their race.
The accusation laid bare a deep divide in the Democratic party and prompted pushback from many Democrats, who circled the wagons around Pelosi. But after Sunday, the intra-party feud seemed to be ancient history after Trump’s tweets, which dominated the news cycle for the rest of the week.
This week’s drama involving the “squad,” which has totally consumed American politics and forced moderate Democrats to come to the defense of brazenly anti-American democratic socialists, has many on the Right saying that Pelosi is a victim of her own radicalism.
Pelosi is learning a lesson that radicals throughout history have always learned — too late. Pumping the brakes rarely helps once the revolution starts.
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