What happened to Paul Pelosi was awful. No one should be attacked by a person with a hammer in their own house. There are a lot of questions as to exactly what went on, but for the moment I am going to avoid them.
The media and many in the Democrat Party have used the attack to condemn the Republicans for ‘hate speech’ which they deem responsible for the attack. But let’s look at some of the recent statements and actions of Democrats.
In June 2018, CNN reported:
The California Democrat (Maxine Waters) and vehement critic of President Donald Trump made the comments on Saturday, first at a rally in Los Angeles and later in a television interview. The comments, which come after several Trump administration officials have been recently protested at restaurants, have raised fresh questions about the state of American political discourse and were seized on by Trump for political gain.
“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents,” Waters said at the Wilshire Federal Building, according to video of the event.
Was that hate speech? When Steve Scalise was shot by someone who worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign, was that hate speech?
Politicizing the Paul Pelosi attack is risky on many levels. There are too many unanswered questions about the attack–why were the security cameras turned off, how did the attacker get into a community with its own security force, why didn’t the security system react, why was the glass broken from the inside and the fact that the attacker was an illegal alien with no conservative political ties.
Democrats would do well to remember the Wellstone Memorial–not one of their finer moments.
In 2002, The New York Post reported:
WHAT possessed them? How could Minnesota’s Democrats have been so foolish as to turn a memorial meeting for eight people tragically killed in a plane crash into a campaign rally for the United States Senate?
The Paul Wellstone memorial pep rally will be recorded as one of the supreme mistakes in recent political history – an entirely avoidable and unnecessary fiasco.
Just how big a fiasco? Jesse Ventura, the state’s independent governor, said he felt “violated” by the four-hour event. Ventura said he was considering the appointment of a non-Democrat to fill out the remainder of Wellstone’s Senate term, which lasts until the beginning of the new year.
That’s very significant. Why? Because the U.S. Senate will be meeting again after Election Day in a lame-duck session that will last four weeks or so. If Ventura’s lame-duck appointment were to line up with the Republicans, he would throw them control of the Senate for the first time since 2001.
Turning a tragedy into a political event can easily backfire. The Democrats need to be very careful in handing the attack on Paul Pelosi. (Just as a side note–Ted Kennedy was supposed to be on the airplane with Paul Wellstone, but decided at the last minute not to take the plane.)