“Don’t mess with me!” That’s what Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, had to say when responding to a Sinclair Broadcast Group reporter’s question at a news conference in Washington, D.C. last week.
With finger pointing and back straight, she stood her ground and responded powerfully to what looked to me like a staged question. “Do you hate the president?”
Of course! That’s why Democrats are pursuing the impeachment of this president. They simply hate Donald Trump. It has nothing to do with his being caught bribing a foreign head of state, or obstructing justice in multiple congressional investigations, or enriching himself at the expense of the American people. Nothing to do with respecting the sacred oath each and every one of them (including Donald Trump, I might add) took to uphold the Constitution. No, it’s because they hate the guy.
In case you don’t know, Sinclair Broadcast Group is a conservative, right-leaning broadcast TV giant that has acquired 193 local TV stations nationwide that reach 40% of Americans. And since about 37% of Americans get their news from their local TV station, the one they’ve been watching for years, they likely have no idea that the news they’re watching now has a strong rightward tilt.
Speaker Pelosi is unquestionably the most powerful woman in American politics today and she is a role model for us all. Here is a nearly 80-year-old woman who will not be talked down to or silenced, not by that former Fox News reporter and definitely not by the president.
So, Pelosi spoke angrily, but articulately, in response to a Republican talking point hiding as a question. Before telling that reporter not to mess with her, she told him “this is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office. As a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone.”
She went on to say that she prays for the president every day, which is quite amazing. Clearly, she is a much better person than I am. If I were a praying kind of person, my prayer would not be for Donald. No, it would be for this country and its people, that we will survive this onslaught of cruelty, dishonesty, lawlessness and corruption that is being perpetrated by this president, his administration and his Republican backers.
And true to form, the Donald took to Twitter as soon as he heard what she’d said, tweeting “Nancy Pelosi just had a nervous fit.” You see, we women are not supposed to express ourselves with anger. We must suppress those powerful emotions or what we say will be denigrated and ignored as hormone infused ravings.
This makes it awfully hard for women to compete in this white man’s world where men can get as angry as they please and still succeed.
Case in point is Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing in which a woman, Christine Blasey Ford, testified about the trauma she has suffered all her life due to Kavanaugh’s attempt to rape her when they were both teens. She never raised her voice as she told her story, never expressed emotion when describing what happened to her. She knew if she did, she would have even less of a chance to be believed.
Now compare that with Kavanaugh’s testimony. Filled with anger, he yelled, he scowled, he threatened and then he even cried as he defended himself against the accusations. And, of course, he was promptly confirmed to a lifetime seat on the high court. Blasey Ford has been consigned to a life of being trolled by the right-wing underworld. She tried to do the right thing for her country, and as a result her life will never be the same again.
Speaker Pelosi is not the only woman in the news these days that has my admiration. I’m thinking in particular of Fiona Hill, the former Ukraine and Eurasia expert in Trump’s own National Security Council, and Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine. They each testified last month at the House impeachment hearings. These women, having dedicated their lives to public service, took the enormous personal risk to come forward to speak the truth about the president’s actions regarding Ukraine.
Hill gave powerful testimony, pushing back multiple times against Republican committee members’ repeated references to already debunked conspiracy theories. Here she is in her opening statement, partially in response to Rep. Devin Nunes, one of Donald’s most prominent attack dogs: “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternative narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”
Yovanovitch testified of her concerns about Ukraine and about her dismissal last spring from her post there after being targeted by a smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, and the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. It seems Yovanovitch was doing such a good job encouraging the Ukrainians to end their endemic corruption, that she was preventing the president from introducing his own.
While she was testifying, right there on TV, our president, who seems to have nothing better to do with his time, tapped out a tweet denigrating the ambassador and her life’s work for the State Department and the American people. It was witness intimidation, clear as day. Another article of impeachment delivered by the president himself, perhaps?
There are so many women who are standing up and speaking out, it’s beyond thrilling to watch it happening. It is enormously inspiring to see their courage in the face of such power gone rogue. It gives me hope that someday women will no longer be forced to contort themselves into emotional pretzels in order to be listened to with the same respect men give to each other.
Maybe I’ll pray, after all.
Karen Gardner of Haydenville, a retired computer programmer, is a bird watcher, nature photographer and ukulele player. She can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.