Three days out from an attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in their San Francisco home, we still know precious little about the attacker’s motivations—or, for that matter, about what precipitated the attack itself.
That hasn’t stopped Democratic politicians and their allies in the mainstream media from fingering the culprits—their Republican adversaries—and concluding that, eight days out from an election in which they are bracing for a shellacking, the GOP should spend the final week of the campaign sitting on the bench, reflecting, atoning. How convenient. How cravenly and transparently political.
Pelosi herself, meanwhile, is fundraising on the back of the attack. This is the message tacked to the bottom of an email blast from her office that landed in inboxes on Saturday evening:
To hear the media tell it, Republicans are responsible for the attack and, while Pelosi raises money in this final week, they must cry uncle. Chuck Todd noted with surprise on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that ads against Pelosi "are still on the air."
Punchbowl News on Friday suggested there was something untoward about Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance urging voters to "fire Pelosi"—or, as they put it, employing "the ‘fire Pelosi’ rhetoric."
The media hive mind is real, and—lo and behold—the geniuses at the Washington Post also traced the attacks to "a ‘Fire Pelosi’ project—complete with a bus tour, a #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) engulfed in Hades-style flames—devoted to retaking the House and demoting Pelosi from her perch as speaker." The audacity!
Enter former president Barack Obama with a warning that "demonizing" people and stirring up division is dangerous. When he came to this realization isn’t entirely clear—certainly many years after sitting in the pews listening to his friend Jeremiah Wright and cavorting with Louis Farrakhan, but not before arguing that Republicans are warmongers who have a lot in common with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
We know Obama’s exhortation only swings one way. Democrats are of course still out there trying to discern the motive for the attacks on the novelist Salman Rushdie, New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin (R.), and Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.).
It’s been just a few months since the New York Times got clear of defamation charges over the outrageous attempt to pin the shooting of Gabby Giffords on Sarah Palin. How about the Atlanta spa shooting that was pinned on the anti-Asian rhetoric of the Republican Party? Again, total nonsense. But the Democrats who write the news are in lockstep with the Democrats who make the news—and, of course, the Democrats who stand to benefit from Republicans sitting out the last week of the campaign.
Enough already. We await the conclusions of investigators in the Paul Pelosi case with an open mind and the knowledge that these things are often not what they first appear. In the meantime, Republicans should campaign hard until the polls close. Nancy Pelosi sure will be.