The Messed-up Morality of Nancy Pelosi

Nancy’s guide to good and evil

Nancy Pelosi has had a wildly successful political career. She went from being a housewife in the seventies to party chair for the Democratic Party for California in 1981 to a member of the House of Representatives in 1987 to Speaker of the House on four separate occasions. She was first elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2007, and is the first woman to ever fill the role, making her a monumental figure in politics.

She is, along with Hillary Clinton, arguably the most powerful woman in the history of American politics.

These are achievements of the highest order.

Yet, her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was mayor of Baltimore from 1947 to 1959 and a prominent member of the Democratic Party. Her brother, Thomas D’Alesandro III, went on to become mayor of the very same city from 1967 to 1971. Nancy even attended the inauguration of JFK in 1961 when she was 20 (here’s a pic), and she used ‘manage’, whatever that means, her dad’s big book of folks who owed him favours.

And there’s more. That same John Fitzgerald Kennedy asked the FBI to have a little look into just how connected Nancy’s father was to the mob. That same Nancy married a very successful venture capitalist in 1963, Paul Pelosi, giving her the comfort and time she needed to raise their children before making the formal leap into politics. Paul also has links to politics by way of his brother, Ron.

Nancy, through her investments and whatever else one may imagine, has now amassed a fortune of somewhere in the region of $114 million, this in spite of the niggling fly in the ointment that she earned $223,500 when acting as Speaker of the House. Paul Pelosi now has a net worth of roughly $180 million; it is unclear how much overlap there is between the two. What is not unclear, however, is that Nancy’s earnings shot up while performing her duties as House Speaker.

If we put all this together, we get an interesting contrast of a person who has climbed to the very top of society and realised most everything there is to realise, who was also born into wealth, success and a particularly propitious social position, who was groomed to reach the zenith of the Democratic Party, who was given every gilded opportunity to get where she got to: a person who achieved most everything there is to achieve who was given every chance to achieve it.

You can’t take her achievements away from her. By the same token, you can’t omit all the help she had.

Be that as it may, Nancy Pelosi does seem to be self-serving to the extreme and an absolute master of the art of moral gymnastics.

The sort of dualistic dynamic which carves a Grand Canyon-size hole right through the heart of Nancy Pelosi’s life is much the same as that which sunders her political views and positions into shards that remain split off from one other, this preventing anything approaching a relatively cohesive and relatively moral core from emerging. All politicians entertain a fairly flexible ethical code as the name of the game is to get into power in the first place to then, if we give them the biggest possible benefit of the doubt, enact some part of the good things they say to some degree. Be that as it may, Nancy Pelosi does seem to be self-serving to the extreme and an absolute master of the art of moral gymnastics.

I will provide only a single example of this Houdiniesque ability to contort this way and that, to essentially end in any position deemed efficacious by whatever nefarious calculus she employs for such diabolical quadratics, all the while smiling that big smile with big black eyes glistening with intent, much like a shark before it bites you in two.

And I will concede from the very start that one example may be an anomaly and signify nothing but the fleeting vapours of a form that was never there to begin with, or it may be a piece in a puzzle that points the way to a cohesive whole comprised of malice, mendacity, moral destitution and ten square miles of self-interest.

You will doubtless inform me in the comments of why one example proves nothing and why I’m wholly off the mark, should you wish to defend Nancy’s honour, of course. And I will concede from the very start that one example may be an anomaly and signify nothing but the fleeting vapours of a form that was never there to begin with, or it may be a piece in a puzzle that points the way to a cohesive whole comprised of malice, mendacity, moral destitution and ten square miles of self-interest.

The example:

Recently, Nancy called Vladimir Putin: ‘one of the most evil people in the world.’ I mention this in my last article, which is where I got the fuel to write today’s piece.

Putin is a dark, odious, ruthless authoritarian linked to a litany of political killings and with closets bursting at the seams with skeletons of any sort you care to mention.

I happen to mostly agree with him apropos the Liberal Order, how Russia has been mistreated and the reasons for the Russo-Ukrainian War. I would also think that he did well during the initial stages of his presidency to stabilise a country that had experienced a series of seismic and existential shocks. Yet, I think the latter part of his eternal incumbency, when we focus in on internal politics, sees a country made deeply sick by a system which sucks the lifeblood from Russia — from its economy, from its political system, from its people and from their minds and imaginations — where that which offered stability for a time became a cancer eating the very vitality of the nation.

‘One of the most evil people in the world’, is still a little outlandish and a little absurd.

In terms of wars, Putin and his regime pales in comparison to the scale of death and destruction the US and its many presidents are operating on. His stranglehold on society and intrusion into daily life is also nothing like that of China, Saudi Arabia, Iran or North Korea.

There are many issues that plague Russian society: domestic violence, male suicide, premature death, pollution, poverty. But that’s the same for many societies and we wouldn’t blame every single issue under the Sun on their leaders. Don’t get me wrong, Putin could do a lot better with some of these, but some of them take decades upon decades to ameliorate and are sometimes dependent on things wholly beyond the control of countries and their leaders.

Gun violence, poverty, institutional racism, the military-industry complex, obesity: some of this can be made better by any single American president, some of it can’t, and some of it is a game of decades. Yet none of it would necessarily make any one president evil. (There are other things that may do, however; I would argue that the zealous support for what Israel is doing in Gaza where tens of thousands are literally being mowed down — an unfair fight if ever there was one — may justify an assignation of evil.)

So Nancy hates Putin and thinks he’s a devil. Okay, understood.

The overall death toll is six times greater than of that in Ukraine, and the daily death rate is the highest of any conflict in the twenty-first century.

There have been 500+ children killed in the war in Ukraine thus far. This a great loss of life and a great tragedy.

There have been 12,400+ children killed in Gaza so far. And let’s call it for what it is. It is not a war. It is a massacre. It is a bloodbath. It is a genocide. It is an adult kicking the living daylights out of a 5-year old. The overall death toll is six times greater than of that in Ukraine, and the daily death rate is the highest of any conflict in the twenty-first century.

And who presides over such barbarous sanguinary? One Benjamin Netanyahu.

Putin launched a war that had been heavily provoked and was highly predictable; extremely easy to understand but impossible to justify, nonetheless. For this, Nancy Pelosi calls him one of the most evil humans on the planet.

Okay. Got ya, Nancy.

I suppose you probably think Benjamin Netanyahu is in the same club, probably a rank or two above Vladimir Putin?

Nope. Nancy says with a big smile and those big shark eyes: ‘I’m not a big fan of Benjamin Netanyahu.’

One of the most evil … not a big fan.

She exclaims elsewhere, in reference to Netanyahu; ‘I don’t like to talk about those kinds of people.’

Oh really? Now you won’t talk? You were proselytising from on high about the apogee of evil, but now someone’s conveniently got your tongue?

500+ children: ‘one of the most evil people in the world.’

12,000+ children: ‘I’m not a big fan.’

The strongest she’s ever gotten to saying anything of real force is that Netanyahu’s ‘conduct’ has been ‘inexcusable’ in reference to what many see as pure unrelenting unadulterated genocide. Notice, his conduct, not his being. If I say you ‘act like an arsehole sometimes’ it is many moons away from ‘you are an arsehole at times’: ‘something isn’t nice’ and ‘you aren’t nice’ are nowhere near one and the same.

So what has Nancy’s Guide to Good and Evil given us?

500+ children: ‘one of the most evil people in the world.’

12,000+ children: ‘I’m not a big fan.’

I’ll leave that dichotomy with you. Let it wash over you, have a little think on it. For my money, it says far more about Nancy Pelosi than it does about Vladimir Putin.