Nancy Pelosi gave her farewell press conference as Speaker yesterday. I’ll pause while the wave of relief and euphoria passes over you, grateful American. In fact, I’ll start over, just so we can enjoy that sentence again.
Nancy Pelosi gave her farewell press conference as Speaker yesterday. It was full of the expected boasting about achievements – it’s not as if she was going to admit she was the most catastrophic failure of a Speaker in recent American history, or that her successor faces the incredibly difficult task of repairing the damage she’s done. There wasn’t even much chance she would apologize for her dereliction of duty in failing to prepare a budget for 2011, leading us into the lame-duck roller derby in December. A thank-you to America for paying vast sums of money to transport her royal family in regal splendor aboard Air Force planes would have been nice.
In the middle of shaking her own hand, however, Pelosi said this: “Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us. It is our mantra, pay-as-you-go.”
That’s just jaw-dropping. Pelosi presided over the greatest expansion of the national debt in history, and when I say “history,” I mean the history of the planet. Our debt soared from $9 trillion to $14 trillion on her watch. It swelled by a trillion dollars in just the past seven months.
As for Pay-Go, that ridiculous lie has been debunked so many times that even the press must have been stifling gasps of astonishment. Does the name “Jim Bunning” ring a bell? He’s the senator from Kentucky who was tarred and feathered for suggesting the Democrats stick to their Pay-Go commitments, when they were bleating that extending unemployment benefits was a super-duper emergency that could not be paid for by cutting a single nickel from our titanic federal budget. They said the same thing anyone had the temerity to remind them about Pay-Go.
This is disturbingly different from the usual spin and rally-the-troops flapdoodle a political leader is expected to shovel out. Not even the skewed perspective of a Representative-For-Life from a far-left district can explain it. As John Boehner gently takes the gavel from her hands and backs away slowly, the Democrat minority in the House must face the possibility that their new Minority Leader is insane.
