The Pelosi Legacy: A Barking Dog with No Teeth

Dogs don’t bark because they’re brave, they bark because they’re scared. The same can be said for the current House Speaker. Afraid of a revolt among the even more left wing of her party, afraid of a president her party looks increasingly unlikely to defeat in November, afraid of domestic and international American success via an approach that does not comport with her more liberal views and achieved without her consent, Speaker Pelosi has entered the twilight of her political career barking at all she fears. Enacting symbolic measures, absent any import, launching an impeachment, replete with hyperbole and hyper-gesticulation, yet devoid of any impeachable offense. In doing so she has both exposed and cemented her legacy, that of a barking dog with no teeth.

This past week, the Speaker spearheaded a largely symbolic effort to limit the President’s war powers, coming of course after a string of international successes that defied her adopted strategy of symbolic talk and no action. Her chosen action itself is wholly bark, with absolutely no bite, a non-binding resolution with no practical effect. Yet, more importantly, is how the feckless maneuver underscores her general philosophy of empty howling over substantive action.

In October, Mrs. Pelosi had, what many would call, a White House meltdown of Chernobyl proportions when President Trump altered the U.S. strategy in Syria. She, of course, preferred the Obama Syrian strategy of ever shifting but never enforced “Red Lines”, an empty bark with no bite. Days later, the Trump administration killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, in Syria. Over a weeklong period in late December and early January, Iranian backed forces killed an American contractor and attacked a U.S. embassy. Days later the Trump administration killed the Iranian mastermind of the attacks, Qassem Soleimani, leading the Speaker to call Trump’s actions “needless provocation” and initiating the empty war powers resolution. The Speaker was revolted, or scared, by a plan of substantive action and thus chose to hit back with symbolic barking.

Following three years of Democrat obsession, fueled by conspiracy theories and predicated on false narratives, Speaker Pelosi, to the elation of her liberal base and at the expense of Constitutional dignity, finally impeached the President. Yet the impeachment itself is nothing more than an empty symbolic gesture. Garnering no bipartisan support, and failing to delineate even a single Constitutional justification, such as bribery, treason, or a high crime or misdemeanor, the Speaker used her position to do nothing more than howl one very loud but ineffectual bark, and one that is Constitutionally guaranteed to fail in the Senate. Scared to disappoint her base and fearful of a revolt within her own caucus, she ran straight towards an empty symbolic, if ineffectual, measure.

Mrs. Pelosi admitted as much on ABC’s This Week, when she said, “Ten months from now we will have an election if we don't have him removed sooner. But, again, he'll be impeached forever.” If Mrs. Pelosi believes that President Trump will in fact be “impeached forever”, she is all but admitting that her impeachment gambit is nothing more than a baseless attempt to put an asterisk on Trump’s thus far successful presidency. Nothing more than a formal declaration that she does not like the President, but afraid she cannot remove him or prevent his reelection. Again, all bark, no bite.

It has now been over three weeks since the “urgency of the situation” compelled Speaker Pelosi to hold her partisan vote, and it appears that she is finally ready to send the crime-free articles of impeachment to the Senate. For three weeks she held the articles so that she could bark at Mitch McConnell in a vain attempt to get her way. Yet without any bite, she has now resigned herself to the Senate’s authority, and the trial must go forth based on the articles the House, under her control, put together.

Speaker Pelosi will hold the procedural vote in the House, and they will transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate. She will assign her team and they will carry her work product to the trial. And the sheer emptiness of the culmination of her three-year vendetta will be laid bare. When all is said and done, the President will be exonerated. She will have extracted nothing from the Senate for all of her barking. She will have produced nothing from her three-year, fear precipitated quest to unseat Trump and prevent his reelection. And she will cement her legacy as nothing more than a barking dog with no teeth.

Sorry but I think calling Pelosi ‘afraid’ actually gives her too much credit.

She is a fool, but especially a vain fool. If you can stand to listen to her interviewed, her focus is constantly on herself and specifically the speakership. It was all she talked about before getting it and certainly all she talked about while holding it. And then she talked about it even more when she was out of power. And you know how she’s been carrying on since she regained it.

I’ve often said with only slight exaggeration that she would be fine with 434 Republican members of the House as long as she could remain Speaker. What effective difference would there be? The cessation of silly virtue signalling resolutions from Democrats? A stop to investigations and impeachments that go nowhere?

Regular order ie the House doing its job is a rare thing thanks to Pelosi who would rather be on TV, holding pressers or holding court somewhere. Do we need more laws? No. But we certainly don’t need The Pelosi Show every hour.

Pelosi shows unmistakable signs of cognitive decline. Boasting and bigging oneself up are typical signs of such decline. It’s clear that she thinks she’s as slinky as Catwoman with similar feminine wiles but her attempts at humor with that strange close-eyed grin are bizarre. She’s like one of the Golden Girls - an 80 year old who thinks the 16 year old parking valet is flirting with her. Sad.

Equally sad but hilarious are her melodramatic invocations. It’s a sad day, it’s a solemn day, I’m praying for XYZ. When she assumed the speakership she said that we ‘shouldn’t be afraid of a Catholic grandmother’ but like all leftists to her religion is a refrigerator magnet to be affixed and removed at will.

Interestingly, you didn’t hear much from Pelosi as Speaker or otherwise during the Obama years. His crime, not that it was publicized, was hogging the spotlight - something he was well-practiced at. You almost never saw the so-called Dem leadership together, in his second term especially, because of the clash of egos.

Irony has a way of blanketing the nonsense in DC and the current dose of irony is that Pelosi trusted a couple of mindless hacks in Schiff and Nadler. Kevin McCarthy said it was an open secret that Pelosi viewed Nadler as inept. And, indeed, his role in impeachment was all but minimized despite being nominally responsible for 50% of it. That left Schiff. But where is Schiff these days? He’s also been pushed to the edge of the stage if not off it completely - because he delivered the damp squib of a single phone call with a publicly-available transcript that contains nothing impeachable - actually nothing objectionable at all.

The upshot is that Pelosi is on an island mostly of her own making because of the freaks and fools that comprise the current leadership. She can’t trust any of them and at this point doesn’t want to. She’s a tired old bird (compare morning and daytime speech patterns to evening speech patterns). Despite jokes about alcoholism and Johnnie Walker Blue on her grace-and-favour government jet we are repeatedly assured that Pelosi doesn’t drink. Fine, have it your way. Why, then, is the second-in-line presidential successor pronouncing it ‘Conshishushun?’

We are told even by ‘our’ side that she’s a clever political animal. The old iron fist in the velvet glove. But do clever politicians constantly get snared in their own barbed-wire fence? Leave themselves with no tactic except to wage a PR war? The media’s feedback loop has convinced her - mistakenly - that she’s holding her own or even advancing slightly.

As for actual politics, where is Pelosi vis-a-vis the Democratic presidential field? If she wants to maximize her chances of remaining Speaker then surely she should be minding the store along with the DNC and other power brokers? She doesn’t lend support. She doesn’t suggest (wink wink) policy or platform ideas. She rarely mentions them by name and only mentions them generically as foils for her bete noire Donald Trump.

I’m tired of hearing how she attempted to stave off impeachment. She did no such thing. But she was warned repeatedly that this was a very large bazooka that had only one shell. Aim and timing were critical. And Pelosi essentially ran outside and fired the thing in a random direction at a random time. She then cooked up this ‘transmittal’ artifice. I almost wish the Supreme Court would have gotten involved to say ‘House, you’re done. Over. Finished. You have nothing to transmit because it’s already on the record and the Senate is solely in charge now.’

In sum, she’s front and center because she wants to be - but also because she has no choice.

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