Thread by @JamilSmith

I had shared Maureen Dowd’s valentine to Speaker Pelosi, but then I thought better of it. Find it on your own. I’ll address the writing first: it was irresponsible, applying no critical thinking whatsoever to a horrid Senate border funding bill—or Pelosi’s role in its passage.

What did Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez do to Pelosi to make her so dismissive and cruel to them? It’s evident that she views their worth purely in terms of their votes in Congress—labeling their public support as “whatever.” She goes out of her way to insult them. Why?

(Also, I ask that you please stop with the sarcastic “we’re so surprised such-and-so sucks as a columnist/politician/etc.” tweets. They are exhausting to read and not nearly as clever as you all think. I have my opinions on Dowd as a columnist, but I am making a specific point.)

I happened to see Pelosi speak the morning that she gave Dowd this interview, at the Alice B. Toklas Breakfast before the SF Pride parade. She was treated as a hero there for her early advocacy on behalf of her San Francisco constituency stricken by HIV and AIDS. She deserved it.

Dowd mentions this, but doesn’t truly hold Pelosi to account for the hypocrisy she shows now in going after young idealists who are not merely chasing far leftist goals that are unattainable, but doing much the same thing she did: being bold in pursuit of constituent priorities.

While @AOC used her break time to inspect the immigrant concentration camps, Pelosi used some of hers to have chocolates with Dowd during a national interview in which she dumped, again, on the four Congresswomen who made the bold and correct stand against the administration.

I didn’t even mention what Pelosi said about Trump, with whom she keeps getting credit for “sparring” well, as that means fuck-all to those kids in the camps or those getting screwed by his policies. More stuff about “self-impeachment,” which isn’t real. It isn’t worth quoting.

There are things that Democratic leadership does, particularly to the young insurgency within its party, that remain puzzlingly self-destructive. Doing @nytimes interviews that are critical of fellow members who are going into concentration camps while you are not is one of them.

“Those four women did the right thing,” I wrote of the new members of Congress who opposed the House border funding bill. “There really is no reason to trust the Trump administration with a dime of border funds until it ends the abuse of children there.” rol.st/2NfQafv