Video: Pelosi chokes up over potential for political violence

Never mind, of course, that we’ve already seen political violence — it’s coming from the unions. And from ObamaCare supporters, such as the protester in Tucson who elbowed a man to the head after disrupting a Tea Party forum. The incitement is coming from groups supporting ObamaCare like HCAN, who trains their followers on how to disrupt town-hall forums and create turmoil.

Is Pelosi all choked up about those groups, or calling for them to take responsibility for the violence, actual and potential, that they incited this summer? Of course not:

Asked at a news conference on Capitol Hill about the possibility of anti-government rhetoric leading to violence, Pelosi, D-Calif., started to choke up as she recalled violent episodes that took place in San Francisco.

“I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw — I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco, this kind of — of rhetoric was very frightening and it gave — it created a climate in which we — violence took place,” Pelosi said.

“And so I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made, understanding that — that some of the people — the ears it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume,” she said.

“But, again, our country is great because people can say what they think and they believe, but I also think that they have to take responsibility for any incitement that they may cause.”

In 1978, former San Francisco city supervisor Dan White shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk inside City Hall. Milk was at the time the highest-ranking openly gay elected official in the country.

Pelosi knew both Moscone and Milk as a Democratic Party activist in the 1970s.

It wasn’t political debate that drove Dan White to commit murder. He was a lunatic. At his trial, White tried to evade responsibility for his acts in part through arguing that he had a diminished capacity caused in part by his diet, which led to it being ridiculed as “the Twinkie defense.” White only got sentenced to a short term in prison, which was a grave injustice. He should have gotten two life terms for the murders, which was a good argument for a better approach in California to law and order.

Milk and Moscone’s murder has nothing to do with political debate, and no one other than White was responsible for the murders. Pelosi wants to silence opposition since she cannot outargue it, and her implied references to the murders of Milk and Moscone as somehow comparable to political opposition to the Obama administration is flat-out despicable.

Update: It’s also worth pointing out that Dan White was not a right-wing politician; he was a registered Democrat and considered a moderate. He assassinated Moscone after the mayor refused to reappoint him as supervisor, a post White had resigned but then regretted leaving. He shot Milk five times on the way out of City Hall after personal animosity between the two had erupted earlier over a zoning dispute.

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