The New York Times is fully behind the GOP's effort to make Nancy Pelosi the lightning rod for this election. Nobody does it like the Times. According to Jennifer Steinhauer's
hit piece, Pelosi is the uber-Hilary: a rabid, ruthless, greedy, elitist, money-grubbing, opportunistic harpy bitch. Read this article and tell me it is anything more than a love letter to Karl Rove.
More about Pelosi after I take a brief look at this crappy article.
Steinhauer (I think) avoids saying anything demonstrably false--this is the Times after all. But the language is extremely loaded:
She favors alternative sentencing over prison construction, schools without prayer and death with taxes.
And check out this lovely framing:
For Republican strategists laboring to maintain control of Congress, she is the personification of liberal lunacy, an Armani-clad elitist who will help push lawmakers toward an agenda of multicultural, tax-raising appeasement.
To many Democrats, Ms. Pelosi embodies their raw antipathy for a Republican Party that has held them largely to the margins for more than a decade, and their hope that a Democratic Congress could make trouble for a president with whom they are at bitter odds.
Notice the appearance of even-handed treatment. Then notice that Steinhauer is comparing the views of a bunch of swift-boating cretins with the views of..."many democrats", a faceless crowd of bitter, castrated sore losers.
...her smile-while-she-gnaws-at-you style and her legislative prowess have gained her respect, if not good wishes, from colleagues and foes.
translation: she's a bitch. Not even her colleagues (including fellow Democrats?) can stand her.
She made her way through the crowd greeting many people by first name, smiling. "How was Paris?" she asked Ann Cox Chambers, a billionaire former ambassador, clutching her hand.
Ms. Pelosi ate nothing and even in casual conversation seemed to be reading from a script. One woman complained to her about Republican advertisements. "The Republicans are unconcerned about money, truth or decency," Ms. Pelosi said, staring into the woman's eyes while delivering one of her standard speech lines.
Translation: she's warm and personal with her fellow jet-setting elitists, robotic and dull among the masses.
This article completely ignores how the Republicans in Congress have treated the minority party in recent years, effectively cutting them out of government altogether. (For more on this see Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone.) Pelosi is an evil witch because she hasn't put up with it. That's what the NYTimes and the GOP have against her.
Let's not kid ourselves: Pelosi is a career politician. I don't always like her tactics or her positions. Nevertheless, I think even the netroots have been less kind to her than she deserves. Reading through some recent diaries, many folks are angry that she said impeachment was "off the table". A Bush impeachment is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But Pelosi's statement is really nothing to worry about. The current media orthodoxy cannot abide the thought that Bush might be guilty of high crimes which they themselves abetted. When the subpoenas go out and hearings get under way, however, the media and the public may (don't hold your breath) decide these guys are crooks after all. And at that point, Pelosi will be permitted if not encouraged to change the party's position on impeachment. It's not the Speaker's job to initiate a movement towards impeachment: it comes from the public (which is why it worked on Nixon and did not work on Clinton).
Pelosi is a fighter and has raised a ton of money for this election. What we've seen of her "First 100 hours" agenda (something Steinhauer alludes to only briefly since it doesn't fit into her Bobo-inspired narrative) is impressive. She has not polled well at DailyKos in the past, but I think she deserves a show of support.