When accepting an award from Planned Parenthood recently, Pelosi (Calif.) also insulted those who disagree with her, saying, “When you see how closed their minds are and how oblivious or whatever it is — dumb — then you know what the fight is about.”
Which sure sounded to me as though she’d called those who disagree with her on abortion rights dumb. (Her spokesman said no, no; she meant only whoever it was she’d been telling a story about who’d remarked soon after she was first elected to Congress in 1987 that “Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows more about having babies than the Pope.”) But she is still telling that story 27 years later — I’ve heard it several times — because it makes those who disagree look silly.
In 2011, she went even further, saying that Republicans who voted for a measure opposing abortion rights were willing to let “women die on the floor.”
That kind of statement requires a certain amount of denial. For one thing, denying that R’s and D’s are similarly motivated, even if they arrive at different conclusions, allows her to caricature her political opponents. To suggest that the only reason to oppose abortion rights is disdain for women, even though she’s also said that her family in Baltimore opposed abortion rights, along with some of her dearest and oldest friends — and of course she doesn’t think of them that way.
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