Pelosi And The People

From Pelosi Gets "Booked" & Confronts Her Own Past by Linda Milazzo:

For me, as an Italian American woman who wants Pelosi to succeed, watching her in action was difficult. She's sweet and congenial and inherently likable. But those positives pale when compared to her tragic misdeeds. Those of us who value our democracy and our Constitution are too patriotic to succumb to her charm. If only her valor, her love of nation, and her observance of the rule of law matched her likability. But they don't.

Saddest of all is the contrast of who Pelosi once was to who she his now. For a woman who was once at the cutting edge of social progressivism, Nancy Pelosi has lost her way. She has strayed from her former social consciousness into the malaise of power. A sorry state for a woman who 32 years ago was a pivotal player in the 1976 Presidential campaign of radically progressive California Governor, Jerry Brown.

In that critically important campaign, known as "The People's campaign," Pelosi helped Brown push hard for social values. She was instrumental in his win in the Maryland primary. Who would believe that 30 years later, Nancy Pelosi, who'd fought so hard for social change, would subvert the Constitution and enable the crimes of George Bush and Dick Cheney? In 1976, Nancy Pelosi was a well connected political volunteer and social justice activist. She maximized her minimal power to promote a grassroots Presidential campaign.

Today, that same Nancy Pelosi, with exponentially more power, turns a deaf ear to "The People" and quashes their dissent. How troubling that a once valiant activist, at the forefront of social causes, is now a tool of the administration and an adversary of participatory democracy. Since January of last year, members of peace and justice organizations across the nation, not to mention her own San Francisco constituents, have been begging Pelosi to meet with them to discuss defunding and ending the war in Iraq and impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney. Pelosi has refused their requests.

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