Strange New Respect for…Nancy Pelosi?: Podcast

We live in desperate times when the brake on both Democratic socialism and Republican executive-branch abuse is a 78-year-old San Francisco Democrat.

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Strange New Respect for…Nancy Pelosi?: Podcast

JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS/Newscom

Who does the best insult comedy about the Green New Deal? Well, President Donald Trump, of course, but let's not leave out of the conversation Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), who famously referred to it as "the green dream or whatever they call it."

Pelosi gets some surprising shout-outs on the new Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast (featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and me), over her stiff-arming progressive fantasia and opposition to the president's emergency declaration, in which she was joined by a lonely libertarian-leaning congressman and senator. The gang also has a good long talk over the contemporary political meaning of "socialism," the ideological content (such as it existed) of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and why you should stop what you're doing and check out this great new Claypool Lennon Delirium video about weirder-than-life rocketeer/cultist Jack Parsons.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

'Keymonica' by Pietnastka is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0

Relevant links from the show:

"Trump Just Might Have Won the 2020 Election Today," by Nick Gillespie

"At CPAC, the Culture War Matters More than Politics or Policy," by Nick Gillespie

"'Everyone' Here Is a Socialist Except Most Americans," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

"Top Pelosi Aide Tells Insurance Industry Medicare for All Would Be Costly, Politically Perilous, and Difficult To Implement," by Peter Suderman

"Rand Paul Will Vote to Block Trump's Emergency Declaration," by Eric Boehm

"Rep. Justin Amash: 'The President Doesn't Get To Just Declare an Emergency,'" by Joe Setyon

"House Votes to Terminate Trump's National Emergency," by Christian Britschgi

"Kamala Harris Wants to Revive the ERA," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

"Rather Than Running for President, Maybe Joe Biden Should Just Launch an Apology Tour," by Scott Shackford

Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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What are we consuming this week?

Matt Welch

• "Blood And Rockets: Movement I, Saga Of Jack Parsons - Movement II, Too The Moon" by the Claypool Lennon Delirium
• Leaving Neverland Part 2 (2019)

Katherine Mangu-Ward

• SpaceX launch

Nick Gillespie

• Miles Davis songs

Peter Suderman

• The Umbrella Academy

---

Comments

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Who does the best insult comedy about the Green New Deal?

No, the co-founder of GreenPeace does.

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[Enjoy Every Sandwich]

Was that really insult comedy on Pelosi's part, or just senility?

[Leo Kovalensky II]

You can say what you want about Pelosi (and she probably deserves it) but she's a shrewd politician and she knows a political loser proposal when she sees it... like the GND.

[Fats of Fury]

So she's on the shortlist for LP nominee?

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

One word: Gravitas.

[BYODB]

Pelosi only appears reasonable when you put her side by side with honest socialists.

[Mithrandir]

Or Harry Reid. What a despicable man he was.

[Sevo]

"Pelosi only appears reasonable when you put her side by side with honest socialists."

Yea, if Pelosi is considered 'sane', it tells you where the bar is, not about her.

[OpenBordersLiberal-tarian]

I was thrilled when the #BlueTsunami returned Pelosi to the Speaker position. I look forward to her presiding over impeachment once Mueller submits his final report.

[Fats of Fury]

Check the photo, she wants you to pull her finger.

[Crusty Juggler]

She is so classy her shits plop into the water like a Chinese high diver.

[Leo Kovalensky II]

You should have changed your username just for this post.

[Chipper Morning Wood]

Yeah, that's gonna be a no from me, dawg.

[Idle Hands]

Why do you allow this squishy moderate do continue to thwart and pull the reigns on AOC and the other powerful women of color she currently caucuses with?

[MiloMinderbinder]

Weld-Pelosi 2020!

[John]

yeah Matt, you and your new girl crush Nancy were so concerned about exectutive abuse of power when Obama was ignoring the entire Immigration System and creating a new legal status that had absolutely no basis in law. God forbid Trump reprogram a few billion dollars in military construction funds. That is a crisis of Democracy.

Reason whored every principle it even claimed to have on the Imperial Presidency when it fell in behind DACA. It is remarkable that Welch is so arrogant and out of touch with reality he thinks he can get away with this.

[Ordinary Person]

It's not necessarily an abuse of power when you don't use the power. It could be an abuse if you were only stopping trucks but not cars for speeding or arresting black people for offenses while letting white people go. But if you weren't stopping trucks or cars for speeding because you'd rather use the limited enforcement resource to investigate industrial pollution then that's not tyranny. We call that prosecutorial discretion. It's quite something else to create new law, i.e. build a wall that wasn't authorized. That's fucking tyranny.

[BYODB]

You might want to look into DACA because it seems clear you're unfamiliar with it. There is a literal act of Congress saying Trump has this ability, like it or not.

[John]

The wall was authorized. And that is not prosecutorial discretion. You are not handing out "you are free to speed cards" to people in your example. That is what Obama did. He didn't just decide not to prosecute people he gave them quasi legal status completely outside the law and in doing so read the entire INA out of the code. That is fucking tyanny. Just becuase it is giving you your pony doesn't make it okay.

Just admit you dont' give a fuck the rule of law or tyranny. You just want shit to go your way by any means neccessary and will rationalize it happening no matter how fucking stupid the rationalization. Make no mistake, your rationalization of this is a fucking insult to my intelligence. Fuck off you God damn boot licking asshole.

[Ken Shultz]

Nancy Pelosi hasn't changed. It's just that the left has shifted so much further to left underneath her that she's no appears to be as far to left as she used to be.

I'm not sure whether we should root for her or against her. Once she's removed from the Speaker's chair, House Democrats will go to the far left.

The reason I'm a fiscal conservative is because I want our country to avoid the needless suffering of inflation and budget cuts being inflicted on us. Much better to choose to make the tough choices now.

There may come a point in the near future when voting for Republicans is obviously the most libertarian thing we can do. The politicians on the left are so fucking socialist. After Nancy comes the deluge.

[Idle Hands]

It's fascinating that Pelosi has emerged as a moderate in her party after basically costing them the house the last time she had a majority in pursuit of a trojan horsing medicare for all with Obamacare. God truly has a sense of humor.

[Ken Shultz]

She hasn't changed one iota. It's just that the ground is shifting left under her feet. The Democrats on the coasts don't need to worry about losing their seats to Republicans anymore, and when all those Democrats from the rust belt states lost their seats, the Democrats lost the incentive to moderate. Why should a representative from California or Massachusetts give a shit about whether something plays well in Ohio, especially when they won their primary by being more radical than the other challengers in their district in Los Angeles or Boston?

I saw a story today showing that Kamala Harris is embracing rent control? We're seeing the same thing happen in the presidential primaries. The top contenders will all be trying to outdo each other in terms of being the furthest to the left.

If you think Pelosi is in trouble now, imagine how bad it would be if one of those Democrats, after being pushed further and further to the left, actually manages to win the White House. Imagine if practically everyone in a leadership role in the Democratic party is further to the left than Pelosi. If a Democrat wins the White House, that's almost certainly what will happen.

[Idle Hands]

We are in a place where Pelosi and Feinstein are basically the moderate wing of the democratic party.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

She hasn't changed one iota. It's just that the ground is shifting left under her feet.

This is the sum of it.

[soldiermedic76]

Bingo. Agree with everything you said Ken. Also, their starting impeachment hearings (well requesting every piece of documentation they can hoping to find something to they could stretch into impeachment) without any crime. And Schiff continues to insist that they have evidence of Trump working with the Russians.

[Rockabilly]

the democrat/progessive/socialist/communist party is destroying itself !!!

HAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHHHAHAAAAAAAAA x infinity !!!!

LOL / forever !!!

[Ken Shultz]

Speaking of the chattering classes and their newfound love of socialism, I just read this over at the WSJ about Jordan Peele's new horror movie "Us":

"Watching "Us", we gradually glean that The Tethered have led a shadow existence of suffering and deprivation in parallel to the Wilsons' cosseted, comfortable life. "There's this idea that we deserve our privilege," Peele says, "but when someone enjoys privilege, there almost has to be someone suffering so you can have that. Which means it's not deserved. It's violent. In this country we shield ourselves from the people who make our shoes. The people who have to work three jobs. The people we've murdered to build over. The wars that have happened so that we can have what we have. If we really acknowledge our place in the world, we have to acknowledge the atrocities, even if we're not active members in them." I observe that Peele has just paraphrased Marx's theories of alienation in describing a potential Hollywood blockbuster, and he doesn't miss a beat: "The Tethered are wearing red."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/jo.....551708118?

Fuck that noise.

Single member districts + Duverger's law = If the Democrats are going socialist, I'll be going Republican.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

[Idle Hands]

Jesus Peele that's a harsh take.

[Ken Shultz]

It's just straight up Marxism.

It sounds like an affluent black family getting their just desserts for trampling on the downtrodden proletariat.

[Idle Hands]

What has he done to atone for his original sin? Last I looked he was a multimillionaire and one of the hottest young directors in Hollywood. He could probably get any project greenlit by attaching his name to it, I don't see him burning his nikes or wearing rags.

[Ken Shultz]

Yeah, capitalism actually doesn't depend on victims, and socialism seems to victimize the weakest the most.

I read a short story in college by a Chinese communist--from before the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. In the story, they throw this guy in a nuthouse because he claims that everyone around him is a cannibal. Everyone in society, he claims, they're all feeding on each other. After the revolution, they let him out because they said he regained his sanity. He saw the people around him working together instead of trying feed off of each other.

When the professor asked me what I thought about it, I said I thought it was the best example of a dated reference I'd ever read. Using cannibalism as a metaphor for capitalism is absurd after the Great Leap Forward. 40 million people out of a population of 600 million died of starvation caused by the collectivization of farming. Many communities were in fact reduced to cannibalism to survive by socialism. No one outside of the CCP associates capitalism with cannibalism anymore. When I think of people being driven to cannibalism by an economic system, I think of communism.

Mr. Peele doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.

I don't know if it's possible to fund a horror film that's a metaphor for the horrors of communism in Hollywood, but why go with metaphor? Maybe a documentary about life under Maduro would be horrifying enough.

[Ken Shultz]

Here it is: "Diary of a Madman".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Madman's_Diary

It's not the good one by Ozzy. This one's different.

[Nardz]

" In the story, they throw this guy in a nuthouse because he claims that everyone around him is a cannibal. Everyone in society, he claims, they're all feeding on each other. After the revolution, they let him out because they said he regained his sanity. "

I thought the twist was going to be that, like Pelosi, his perception hadn't changed, but relative circumstances had.
That is, his claim of cannibalism was insane prior to the revolution, but after it was status quo.

[loveconstitution1789]

We live in desperate times when the brake on both Democratic socialism and Republican executive-branch abuse is a 78-year-old San Francisco Democrat.

HAHAHAHAHA.

Thanks for the really good laugh today Welch.

[BYODB]

Pelosi couldn't give fucks about executive branch abuse before, nor does she do so now. Giving her credit now simply draws attention to the no bills put forward to actually limit the President. Being a partisan hack may look good to retards, but in no way is anyone in Congress doing anything substantive to limit executive branch power.

[loveconstitution1789]

I would actually listen to Welch or anyone in Congress if they put forth a bill to repeal the National Emergency Act.

They are not doing that. They are trying to do damage control after Trump out maneuvered them.

[Weigel's Cock Ring]

Too bad this is mostly bullcrap and she's full of shit. How do we know this? We know this because back in 2009, during her previous go-round as Speaker of the House after Obama got elected, she in fact helped to push a version of this "green dream" socialist bullshit through the House. It was called the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009", aka H.R. 2454. Thankfully for all Americans, it was rejected by the Senate and never became law.

Don't kid yourself, if Jokerface actually thought there was any chance she could actually get this bullcrap passed into law, she would try again. Most people don't remember what happened more than a few weeks ago, but I'm not one of those people.

[soldiermedic76]

Bullshit Nancy Pelosi is standing up to executive overreach. It's all about political theater. She as much as said so when she stated she opposed this emergency declaration but doesn't want to change the law and feels the law allowing this is needed. She also knows it has at best a 50/50 chance in the Senate and no chance once vetoed of meaning shit. So it costs her really nothing.

[soldiermedic76]

We get it Nancy you don't want the wall, but if it works (and proved popular) you will try and ignore how you fought it tooth and nail. Sort of like Obama claiming to have lowered the deficit but fought any cost cutting not related to defense spending tooth and nail.

[Ordinary Person]

Socialism Derangement Syndrome. Learn the symptoms. Get yourself checked. There is help for your disorder.

[soldiermedic76]

Let me guess, it's getting woke?

[loveconstitution1789]

Funny how those Lefties hate that Trump is owning them and the TDS that they have fits them perfectly.

They try to do witty word play but it is just past their mental capacities.

[Sevo]

"Socialism Derangement Syndrome"

Yeah, disliking mass-murder is "deranged" according to this scumbag TDS victim.

[Eddy]

Suggested caption: "Come on in, children, there's candy for all of you!"

[Eddy]

(Come into my gingerbread house, I mean)

[Jerry B.]

Gotta say, that picture has sort of a "Come here little girl. Want some candy?" vibe to it.

[Eddy]

That's way too close to my Hansel and Gretel joke.

[TLBD]

I wish Welch would refer to himself as libertarian-leaning.

Amash and Paul and Massie are certainly far more libertarian than Welch. The guy who wrote an article the other day claiming that police state surveillance of a presidential candidate (and countless other American citizens) is morally the same as wanting those who initiated the police state surveillance to be held accountable.

[Weigel's Cock Ring]

He is becoming more unhinged by the day. He's now openly fantasizing about murdering his political opponents. Expect him to continue to double and triple down on this lunacy as more and more times goes by.

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[Logically]

I think we have just come to the point where Politicians like Bernie and AOC have pushed the perception of previously far-left politicians like Pelosi and Feinstein more towards the normalization curve.