On Friday evening, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi appeared on Late Night in all of her august and resplendent wisdom to lament the degree to which House Republicans have exposed America to hitherto unplumbed depths of human maliciousness, what with all their purely spiteful and stubborn blockages of President Obama’s munificent agenda. Alas, but for these troubled times in which we live! Via Mediaite:

Pelosi then took shots at the John Boehner-led Republican House: “The president has tried to cooperate with the Republican majority led by Speaker Boehner, they really have not cooperated with him. That obstruction has really been their philosophy.”

“They just won’t cooperate with him,” she continued. “So that’s why this selection is so important. We must re-elect President Obama and give him a Congress that can work with him,” she said to cheers and applause. …

“When I was speaker, I cooperated with him with President Bush,” she claimed to Fallon. “This obstruction of the president is something quite new. We got a good deal done when President Bush was president because we said, ‘How can we work together to get results — to solve problems for the American people?’”

“But they have just made a decision to obstruct President Obama,” she concluded. “And that’s just not right for the American people.”

Republicans ostensible ‘decision to obstruct President Obama’ is somehow ‘not right for the American people’? Is that a joke? The current Congress was elected specifically to do precisely that! We elected President Obama in 2008, and after about a year and a half of his presidency, decided we didn’t like where he was taking it — and hence in 2010 voted conservatives into Congress en masse. We have a divided Congress right now: Neither side being able to push through their pet legislation is kind of the idea. Our Founders designed our system to work slowly and without haste for a reason, especially when the American people haven’t awarded one party with more power than another. And by the way, Ms. Pelosi — during your tenure as Speaker of the 110th and 111th Congresses, you were presiding over Democratic majorities in both chambers. I know this whole “obstructionism” thing is a really useful way for President Obama and other Congressional Democrats to use Americans’ widespread distrust of Congress to your campaigns’ advantage, but it’s not quite the same situation.