Media Miss the Point on Pelosi's Endorsement
The only thing surprising about the current mainstream media narrative regarding Nancy Pelosi is its relentless predictability. Practically since the day the Iraq war started to go bad, Democrats have been derided in the press for not having a plan, and choosing pragmatism over principle.
Cut to '06. Hot on the heels of an electoral triumph, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi endorses as Majority Leader the member of the House most identified with speaking out against the war -- the man whose courage in doing so fueled the nationalized campaign that gave Democrats the majority in the first place. I'm speaking, of course, about Jack Murtha.
Murtha then loses the Leadership race to Steny Hoyer. As Pelosi no doubt knew, it was an uphill battle from the beginning -- Hoyer had been tirelessly campaigning for the job among Democratic caucus members for months. But Pelosi gave her support to Murtha because, as she put it in the title of her blog this week on HuffPost: "Bringing the War to an End is my Highest Priority as Speaker."
It doesn't get much clearer or more principled than that.
So what's been the reaction in the media?
According to the Los Angeles Times, Pelosi is off to a "rocky start," while the New York Times says she's "tempting disaster."
Disaster? If wanting to give a high-profile platform to the man most responsible for his party finally locating its spine regarding Iraq (and who, for his troubles, received the full brunt of the Bush/Rove/Mehlman slime machine) is a "disaster," what word do you use to describe the war itself? Disast-orrfic? Catastro-bacle-aster? Disaster-to-the-10th-power?
Maureen Dowd joined the bash-Pelosi-bash with a column entitled "Squeaker of the House," writing:
"Nancy Pelosi's first move, after the Democratic triumph, was to throw like a girl. Women get criticized in the office for acting on relationships and past slights rather than strategy, so Madame Speaker wasted no time making her first move based on relationships and past slights rather than strategy... Ms. Pelosi offered an argument along the lines of: John Murtha's my friend. He's been nice to me. I don't like Steny. He did something a long time ago that was really, really bad that I'm never, ever going to tell you. And I'm the boss of you. So vote for John."
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