She's the 69-year-old speaker of the House of Representatives, second in the line of succession and the most powerful woman in U.S. history.
But when you see Nancy Pelosi, the Republican National Committee wants you to think "Pussy Galore."
At least that's the takeaway from a video released by the committee this week - a video that puts Pelosi side-by-side with the aforementioned villainess from the 1964 James Bond film "Goldfinger...."
"It's an attempt to demean your opponent, rather than debate them. If they're serious that this is an issue of national security, then you'd think that one would want to debate it on the merits," she says. "It's almost as if they can't help themselves."
That's because they can't.
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The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Michael Steele stated in his speech to the RNC that Republicans would be "classy" in going after Democrats; in the two days following you have Steele stating that Obama was only elected because he was black, and this juvenile frat boy attack against Pelosi.
Pure class right there.
What I really think is that we get someone like Wanda Sykes or someone more skilled at trading insults and bring all the best minds of the Republican party together and just have a smackdown. We could get especially great hip hop stars to act as judges, commenting on the eloquence of the insult, how they could improve their form. That would be for the first round. Then we could have a mud wrestling competition. Finally, we could have them try singing in front of the American Idol crew. Anyone who does particularly badly, we could have a pic of Kobe Bryant when he shakes his finger and looks down his nose with a sneer at someone trying to guard him after he makes one of those killer shots of his.
Or perhaps we should just let them put on a daytime soap--Kindegarten Confidential.
I think this type of thing will actually happen more often as the party gets increasingly less diverse (ideologically and demographically). There's less likely to be someone in the room to point out that they have gone way, way over the line.
My husband commented this morning that it took 4 months for the Dems to fall on each other, which if far longer than either of us expected. But as long as the Republicans remain comically unable to form any sort of dignified, unified message that Americans aren't embarrassed to get behind, I think the Dems are free to dither. Which is a shame.
Maybe if Cheney keeps coming out to defend the Bush years it can unite Dems again?
The video is pretty good political blarney. It raises the issue about Pelosi in a way that will reach the bored public, and the issue is real; She has been caught in a serious contradiction.
The video is about as fair as most political messages, no more, no less. There is no reference to Miss Galore by name or image, just the music, without lyrics.
I give the video a pass on content and an A+ on snark.
Are you serious? The 'pretty good' way to criticize the Speaker of the Damn House is by comparing her to a lesbian who changes her mind when Sean Connery sticks it to her? Seriously?
I want to print this comment out and frame it and bring it out at parties when people tell me women take sexism 'too seriously.' Except I never have assholes who tell me that crap at parties.
You are feeding trolls. Please don't do it. I can't delete everyone.
Sorry, I thought I'd seen him about before not trolling.
The thing that's always going to screw the right... they are hard-wired without a sense of humor.
The right thinks Dennis Miller and "An American Carol" (with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of THIRTEEN percent) are a laugh riot.
And of course there was the Fox New's right-wing comedy disaster, "The 1/2 Hour News Hour".
When the right tries to do humor, it just comes off as tacky and in poor taste... because it is.
Much of the left thought that Dennis Miller was funny, until he started making fun of them.
I always find these arguments about one side being hard wired or mentally deficient to be so self serving and creepy. I don't understand why people like Garafalo and Michael Savage just can't accept that people have different opinions on how to solve a problem instead of going into labeling the other side as sick in the head.
Aside from the caveat that I, for one liberal, never thought Dennis Miller was even the least bit funny, I generally agree with what you say here. I think we often rely too heavily on psychological as opposed to philosophical differences to explain our ideological differences.
Agreed. A lot of people on the left thought Miller was a laugh riot 15 years ago. They were wrong. That guy was always a pompous jerk whose whole routine was designed more to amuse himself than anybody else. It was also about ridicule and mockery with an absence of satire or irony, so the whole thing always came off self-important and mean. Alas, when it comes to political humor, the humor part is less important too a lot of people. Look at Bill Maher, for instance.
I've never actually understood what it is miller is talking about...that's mostly why i cannot in good conscience say i think he's funny...
I don't think you're alone. That dude thrives on the nervous laughter of an audience afraid to admit that they don't get it. I don't think he expects people to get his act. I think he likes to leave the audience scratching its collective head. He was a self-important douche on SNL. He was a self-important douche on his network show. He was a self-important douche on HBO. He's a self-important douche today.
I hate to be the voice of dissent in slamming the Republicans, but some of the things liberals were saying about Sarah Palin was just as nasty. Mind you, we had debate within the liberal community and plenty of voices of well known liberals condemned that sort of thing.
We'll have to wait and see if any of the women in power in the GOP have anything to say about this, or if anyone in the media thinks to ask them.
What women in power in the GOP? The only voices I can think of are the two Senators from Maine and they keep getting trashed as RINOs.
For starters, I'd count the governors of Hawaii and Alaska and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who is enough of a threat in the Texas governor's race to account for Rick Perry's little dance with secessionists. And don't forget Michelle Bachman and the other representative who claimed Matthew Shepard died in a robbery and Katherine Harris. Not to defend the GOP in general, but they're not stuck in 1920 on the issue of women in office.
but some of the things liberals were saying about Sarah Palin was just as nasty.
Well I think we can't begin to judge the truth of that statement until you cite some examples of which liberals you mean and what exactly they were saying that was as nasty. (I assume you don't mean to reference something silly like a Dailykos diarist.) But more importantly, the parallel here would have to be that these very nasty statements were developed and distributed by the representative arm of the Democratic party. That there are sexist liberals is not something that you will find people disputing very often. That is quite something different from the point here with the Republicans which is that the party itself is reflexively misogynist.
Pretty much anyone who talked about her potentially not being the mother of Trig Palin. But those were bloggers (some well known. I'm looking at you, Andrew Sullivan, despite not calling yourself a liberal) But there was more class from the official DNC sources on criticism of Palin, so that point is taken.
Also, something that should be pointed out is that sexism-- especially at this level of egregiousness-- should be pointed out and fought against no matter who is perpetrating it.
Ditto Brent.
I don't so much disagree with you as I'd ask you to provide some evidence. In this instance, I'd like to see the DNC doing something like this. My impression is--coming off of the primary--they were deathly afraid (and rightfully so) of turning off women.
I don't doubt that some liberals did say some pretty foul stuff about Palin. But this is the RNC...
I don't so much disagree with you as I'd ask you to provide some evidence.
From Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion
This is the same Ta-Nahisi Coates who wrote of John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin: "I don't care if you know a thing about foreign policy. I don't care if you know a damn thing about the economy. Here is what you are to me--breasts, hair and a lovely smile." And who referred to Sarah Palin's selection as being the result of "bigotry, ignorance and cravenness."
Paul L.
I just read the article from Legal Insurrection, and followed the link to the original article by Coates.
You need to check your source a little more carefully. Legal Insurrection cut out a very important part of that quotation...
'And this is what McCain has to say to them, "I don't care if you know a thing about foreign policy. I don't care if you know a damn thing about the economy. Here is what you are to me--breasts, hair and a lovely smile."'
That is absolutely intellectually dishonest... mendacious in the extreme. The charitable interpretation is that you just took the lies from Legal Insurrection at face value... but I suspect the more likely one is that you knew damn well that they lied like rugs and decided to link to them instead of to the original quote because you were hoping to slip it by.
Pull the one in the middle... it's got bells on it.
I was going to ignore the comment so as not to feed the trolls poly, but well stated. I would add that when one needs to resort to this level of dishonesty to refute a case, its generally pretty telling about how weak one's argument is to begin with.
More importantly in this case, even if the point that Paul L raises was not an almost comically dishonest inversion of what TNC actually wrote, its still not on point. Again, the video in question was created by the representative arm of the Republican party itself, not by some political blogger or commenter. That cannot be emphasized enough, I think.
"...when one needs to resort to this level of dishonesty to refute a case, its generally pretty telling about how weak one's argument is to begin with."
It's the GOP way--their "leaders" do it and since their followers don't think for themselves, they operate in a similar fashion.
Score: Poly, +10; Paul, -5. Pwned.
Good looking guys. Appreciate the fact check. Dude, couldn't even bother to spell my name right while quoting me out of context. Le sigh.
This should work about as well as when they compared Obama to Dr. No.
I'm just waiting till the Republicans compare him to Ricardo Montalbán in The Man with the Golden Gun. I hope you remember his peculiarity in that movie.
Aside from the childishness, aside from the obvious sexism, which in Pelosi's case is very much the carbon copy of the way some respond to Clinton, there is a larger issue here, which the latest Pelosi flap serves right wing and Republican interests well. These folks are not so much sexist as they pander to sexism for their own purposes, which is distraction through misdirection. Here is (Marcy Wheeler's Emptywheel at Firedoglake) latest post, yesterday on the Pelosi brouhaha that goes to the heart of the matter: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/05/23/wapo-doubles-down-on-conflict-over-truth/. What the right, Republicana, are really doing with this nonsense is doing their damndest to avoid prosecution as criminals against humanity.
Oh, I get it, Mr. Coates.
You get to whine because some Republicans make some rather appropriate snark against a deeply feckless and incompetent Speaker of your own party.
Previously, however, you did not whine when Bush was compared unfavorably to Hitler, by people in your party, probably by bloggers you knew. Nor did you whine when Democrats walked around in t-shirts that declared that Sarah Palin was a c**t.
If you look real close, you might see that people like David Frum and Allahpundit give a rat's fingernail that you're upset about this little video, but the rest of the Conservative movement (which is considerably larger than the universe of Republicans) is past caring about manufactured outrage from the Democratic Party.
As Mr. Churchill rightly said, "One does not have a conversation with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room." IOW, more astroturfing from David Axelrod and his pals having no meaning whatsoever.
Please waste your time on something substantial, such as the lack of a clear energy policy from this Administration, or the fact that this President is turning the currency into the biggest joke since the Reichsmark. Perhaps this President can find yet another Straw Man argument to frame his outrage at this horrid You Tube atrocity! Oh the Humanity!
Jokes on you, Mr. Coates. You just don't know it, yet. That's something else you can be self-righteous about.
HE CALLED ME A MONKEY!!!! RACIST!!!! I'LL CUT U!!!
Ahem...Have a good Memorial Day guys!
You too! Man, this post really pulled out the trolls.
"Do you expect me to talk, section9?" "No, Mr. Coates, I expect you to die."
Also,
"Previously, however, you did not whine when Bush was compared unfavorably to Hitler"
Which supposes there are favorable comparisons to Hitler.
I mean, honestly, does anyone under the age of 50 even know who Pussy Galore is?
Three days ago, if you had said the name "Pussy Galore" I'd have thought "some random Bond bimbo from the 60's".
I'm 45 years old, have probably seen the movie at some point and aside from thinking WTF does some stupidly named Bond character have to do with Nancy Pelosi, I just didn't get it.
And now, I've watched the ad and googled Pussy Galore. I get why it's offensive, and misogynistic and all that, but the thing that strikes me about the whole thing is that it's just so tragically, hopelessly off target - aside from being irrelevant, out dated and tone deaf.
Can't you just see the discussion that went on during the brainstorming session?
"Man, we got to come up with something that portrays Nancy Pelosi as a lying, self-serving, double-dealing hypocrite about this torture deal".
"I know! Pussy Galore!"
"That's a GREAT IDEA! That will get our point across BRILLIANTLY!"
And then all the 60 year old white guys in the room get a boner at the word "pussy".
Yeah, you're right. They're really not good at this stuff. They've lost the zeitgeist and have no idea how to get it back.
i thought they ment the song by The roots...heh?
The only reason I can see is that Pussy Galore ratted out Goldfinger specifically to the CIA.
"Tragically off-target, yet offensive" is a depressing yet accurate way to sum up half of our two-party system. Or "tragically off-target, yet inane" for the unifying issue of renaming the Democratic Party.
I have to say that I thought the same thing when they did that whole Dr. No bit for Obama opposing the gas tax holiday last summer. And really, that analogy, had racial undertones (as Dr. No is also of mixed race origins), but they were far less overt and obscure than this Pelosi/Pussy nonsense.
Still, I can't bring myself to be offended by any of this. Even when I know that I should be. To me, this is just stupid. And not just because it's sexist, or campy, or out of date. It's stupid because it distracts from what had been a pretty effective media control campaign. The GOP (with Nancy Pelosi's help) had spent the last couple of weeks centering the torture debate around the speaker's questionable honesty and credibility on the matter. We can all argue the merits of that strategy at another time, but this video makes the whole thing so small and petty. They've sabotaged their entire message because last summer somebody thought they came up with a clever pun to be used on Nancy Pelosi on some future date.
It's not that conservatives can't be funny, it's that the Republican Party, or the conservative movement seems to have no interest in being funny. I watched the Half Hour News Hour a couple times, and the problem was that every single gag had to be a political statement. If you look at the show it was based on, The Daily Show, you find that the politics is secondary to the laugh. There is no political statement made by showing footage of the muppets on Sesame Street every time Michael Steele is mentioned. Or to the myriad scrotum jokes. They're just funny, or they're not.
While I never personally watched the Half Hour News Hour, I find it a bit of a dubious assertion that politics is secondary to the laugh on The Daily Show. The show is 90% political humor, 10% crappy interview. I think you mean ideology is secondary to the laugh (although that's certainly not always true either).
The bigger point is why the Republicans would go after the House Speaker as a high-value target. Nobody really cares who the Speaker is, outside of the majority caucus. She's untouchable in her home district You can't really make a Speaker a polarizing figure in the wider population. Just because she's a target of opportunity, for real reasons (not especially big ones,but real ones) doesn't make it worth the effort.
I disagree, the Speaker is a very powerful position and has been the target of attacks by opposing parties for a long time. Tip O'Neill, Jim Wright, Newt Gingrich were all fodder for the other party. O'Neill and Gingrich were both polarizing figures as Speaker. While Pelosi has a safe seat, Tom Foley was elected out of his in 1994. Given Pelosi's performance over the past weeks, it is natural that the opposition would make it an issue.
If Newt showed up at a speech and fumbled through his notes, ineptly trying to explain away something, the Democrats would have made an issue about it.
Unrelated (sorry) but have you seen Jane Dark's book excerpts?
Check this out on Public Enemy: http://janedark.com/2009/05/farrakhans_a_prophet_and_i_thi.html
This is completely off topic ,but i would like to thank all readers of this blog who have served in the US Armed Forces.Your service is appreciatted.
And I hope that we can all take a moment to remember those that died so that we can have the freedom to express our opinions on this blog.Our right to free speech was paid for in blood.
Whether we are liberals or conservatives . We are all in their debt.
May they rest in peace.
Section 9 nails it above. The canned outrage expressed by most posters here compares unfavorably to the independent judgment exercised by Pavlov's dogs.
Why--to characterize Nancy Pelosi as Pussy Galore is so insulting, so, um, dehumanizing! (perhaps similar to the way in which many Demo commentators referred to President Bush as a chimp. Or to President Reagan, in office, as a senile clown. Or to Dick Cheney as an evil thug. No sense disagreeing with someone when you can vilify or ridicule them, right?)
When Wanda Sykes stated that she hoped Rush Limbaugh's kidneys would fail, did Barry O frown/remain grim faced/turn away/express any displeasure whatsoever? No, he smiled. He enjoyed it. This was the President, mind you, not the Republican National Committee (how's that for pulling rank?)
I don't defend Repubs when they do silly things like this Pussy Galore episode. But I take huge exception to the notion that the Demos play by higher, more respectful rules.
It's time for most of the posters here to realize that we live in an age of coarseness, in which one of the highest values seems to be defiance. That we've been living this, increasingly, for forty-plus years, and that all of us are responsible for it. Just like all of us will be responsible for changing it.
PS: Mr. or Ms. Coates: no troll here. But I suspect that anyone who refuses to embrace the prevailing line of one-sided horror at a coarse, dopey political ad is a troll in your book.
This was the President, mind you, not the Republican National Committee (how's that for pulling rank?)
For pulling rank? Its exceptionally lame. Seriously? This is your case? Setting aside that the most recent Republican President actually thought it was funny to joke about the missing WMDs that an uncountable number of innocents have lost their lives over and thought it was chuckle worthy to mock the last pleas of a woman he ordered to be executed, I think you have basically made the point as clear as could be that "that the Demos play by higher, more respectful rules."
Hell, I could do better than what you have done here. It appears that the best example you can dredge up of similar behavior from Democrats is unspecified blog commenters and the President politely smiling at a joke he didn't make himself. If I wanted to make the case that Dems are just as bad, I might at least try to point to some crazy Dem ad from some congressional race or something. That would still be a poor case but it would at least be an attempt to address the fundamental issue that we are talking about an official communication from the RNC here. Instead what we get is the truly pathetic attempt to compare a reaction at an informal banquet to a coarse joke about a radio shock jock to the formal actions of the representative arm of the Republican party toward the Speaker of the House. Sad, man.
Arguing that the RNC is precisely equivalent to anonymous blog commentors and a comic(?) is not a good sign for the health of the Republicans.
My biggest problem is that they couldn't find a better female villain to compare her to. How many good, by which I mean inspirationally bad, female characters are there in pop culture, or even high culture? You've got Lady Macbeth, of course, but that has always been Hillary. At least as long as she was working through Bill -- now that she's out front on her own, that one seems to have dropped off.
Otherwise, you've basically got an assortment of sexpots in cat suits. Which is sexist, of course, but also really, really boring. Male villains are awesome, and they come in all sorts of flavors and colors. Female villains, not so much.
To me, this is one of those things like wanting a lot more three-dimensional roles for actors of color. I want to have a lot more social recognition that problematic women (real and fictional) can be portrayed as something other than sexpots or the occasional scheming wife.
To be fair, writers are catching on a little. Snoop in "The Wire" was marvelous. I'm a big fan of Dolores Umbridge in "Harry Potter," and there were some excellent female villains in "Buffy." (NOT Glorificus, though.) But all in all, the female villain thing needs work.
Glenn Close as Patty Hughes ("Damages"). Mama Petrelli ("Heroes"). Carla ("Burn Notice"). Some of the Sixes and Eights in BSG.
Oh, and you reminded me of Admiral Cain of BSG. She was fun.
A little defensive, are you, Brent?
Actually, the tone of your response illustrates perfectly what I was getting at. You wish to ridicule the response that differs from the tone of manufactured, canned outrage that appeared in most of the other posts. Give it up. But get some self-awareness.
A little defensive, are you, Brent?
So if I understand the deeply incisive point you are attempting to make here, your criticism is now that I am defending my argument. You know what, forget I asked. I am sure your explanation of why offering a defense of one's argument is problematic in a debate would be incredibly fascinating but its also irrelevant.
Your ad hominem psychoanalysis is, of course, deeply convincing but I am sure it will not escape anyone's notice that you still haven't managed to actually address my point about your incredibly lame false equivalence. So I take it that your answer is that that really was the best you could do, huh? Perhaps your argument could stand to be a little "defensivive."
Brent:
If you didn't fine my original post so threatening--and if you truly believed that it was lame, as you claim--I suppose you would have just left it "out there", with its putative obvious lameness clearly visible for all to see, doing your work for you.
You work very hard, don't you, for very little in results? No green jello for you tonight.
So once again, what you have to say on this issue consists entirely of ad hominem and the truly bizarre belief that others' pointing to the absurdity in your arguments somehow demonstrates that you have some sort of point. At no point will you actually try to defend the content of your argument which I am now pointing out for the third time contains a plainly false equivalence. I will take this as further confirmation that you have already presented the best possible argument that you can possibly muster.
So for the record, as the debate stands, the post in question argues that the GOP is inherently sexist and the evidence of that consists of the RNC's production of a commercial which compares the House Speaker to an absurd female caricature from a Bond movie. It also tacitly references an earlier video which compiles commentary from Republican representatives and commentators on Fox News which repeatedly attack House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the basis of her appearance.
Your claim is that commenters here are wrong to be angry about this because the Democratic party is just as crude (This is obviously not really the topic at hand but whatever). Your evidence for this claim is that anonymous unspecified blog commenters who may be Democrats often write unkind things and the Democratic President seemed to find some minor amusement in a harsh attempt at humor about a radio disk jockey that some Republicans like. Your further evidence is that my tone suggests that I find your argument flatly ridiculous and have actually taken a few moments to point out exactly why I believe that.
Is that about the shape of it? You believe that this tremendous argument of yours is "threatening" as opposed to transparently stupid and worthy of ridicule? Well then, I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on that point.