Wednesday, February 5, 2020

What I Think Of Nancy Pelosi Tearing Up Trump's Speech


I mean, for what it's worth, that's what I think of, every time someone talks about showing "decorum" or "decency" or says, "It's about civility."

Yeah, what she did was indecorous and uncivil. Sure was. It's just, well, that's Trump lying while making fun of a disabled reporter. Both of those things, at once, with a few extra layers of lie added on to the first.

For those who don't recall, he claims that he saw video of "thousands" of people singing and dancing on the roof of a New Jersey apartment building, celebrating the 9/11 bombings. No such video has ever been produced.

In his defense, his sychophants instead seized on an article about a police investigation into a few people celebrating 9/11 on the roof of a building, an investigation that never went anywhere, and whose claims could never be corroborated. Trump actually never recanted his claim he saw it on video so he's at the very least lying to himself.

In the picture above, he's talking about the article anyway, claiming that the reporter who wrote that article debased himself to apologize to him for altering his article after the fact. The reporter never altered the article, and there is no record of him speaking to Trump about the article. While telling this series of lies, he's mocking his disability. He has never apologized for it. He has never retracted any of his bald-faced lies. In fact, he claimed that he wasn't familiar with the reporter, despite the man having worked with Trump on a series of articles over many years, including multiple in-person interviews.

It is one of a series of turduckens of deception the man's foisted upon us, but for me it stands out because it's so simply obviously, starkly awful.

And, I get it, two wrongs don't make a right*. Speaker Pelosi had a bunch of options, up to and including just not inviting him to speak, as was customary prior to Woodrow Wilson. Honestly, as a Canadian in the States, it's weird to me how y'all spent so much blood and treasure to get out from under the rule of a pompous regent in order to, in a few short decades, reinvented the pomp and circumstance that surrounds a regency.

Ultimately, though, as someone who's looking at the expiration date of his immigration visa as the time when I'm going to have to start seriously looking at what will happen if my status is not renewed**, I find myself very much not caring that it was indecorous and uncivil. There are a bunch of Facebook posts about the rudeness represented by Speaker Pelosi's actions, but, she didn't mock a disabled reporter. She didn't refer to countries as "shitholes." She didn't belittle a POW's captivity. She didn't falsely claim that immigrants bring "crime and filth." She didn't grift money from a children's cancer charity.

Perhaps, perhaps you could argue that this is exactly why she ought to be civil, that we need to fight his rude incivility with "decent" behaviour, but there's a hard lesson I've learned over the course of time: being "civil" is nice, but "nice" isn't the same thing as kind, and when one person's incivility causes actual, measurable harm, responding with civility is appeasement.

You might also make the intimation that by ripping up that by tearing up one copy of a man's speech she's somehow insulting everyone he spoke about, but that seems odd, especially given that her defense for doing so is essentially what I've been saying here - that speech was, like Trump himself, full of mistruths and outright lies, and not worthy keeping around. I get that. Most of these speeches aren't great. Since I started paying attention to them, around Clinton, I just read the transcript the next day as that's all that really matter anyway.

The only argument that has any resonance for me is that it was a self-centered act and that, I think, has some validity, but it's not a particularly powerful one. You can complain about an act of self-centeredness performed to counter one of the most self-centered creatures in creation, a man who has said, simultaneously, that he doesn't think he's ever done anything that he needs forgiveness for, and that he doesn't like apologizing, but I'm not going to be paying much attention to your complaint.

In the end, it's turned out to be a pretty successful gambit - in the aftermath, there's been little discussion of Trump's actual speech, so maybe the Dems are finally figuring out how to get the media's attention and hold it.

So, that's it. In the game of politics, both teams scored some points that night, and everyone's arguing with the refs, again, even though nothing that happened during the speech actually broke any of the rules.

* Or, as in this case, that multiple wrongs from ones person, and then one wrong from another don't make a right. This isn't a particularly useful idiom here, is it?
** My son is on Medicaid, a publicly funded program. While the taxes I pay*** to the state and federal government more than cover the cost of the services he gets, this makes me potentially subject to having my reapplication denied. Yes, I could avoid this by becoming a citizen, but let's be honest, how welcome do you think you'd feel in a country that wants to kick you out for having the audacity to access the services your taxes pay for, but only because you're foreign?
*** Of course immigrants, even undocumented immigrants, pay taxes. Sometimes directly from our paycheck, sometimes just the ones we all pay every day when we buy gas, etc.

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