Yesterday, Allah covered part of Nancy Pelosi’s self-serving interview wherein she took a personal and professional shot at John Boehner. I admit, from a point of view of a snarky blogger, I appreciated the verbal judo employed by our outgoing Speaker. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to chide a man for his occasional emotional outbursts over politics not all that long after engaging in a little sob-fest of your own to make a shamelessly partisan point. As deft as that was, though, it was nothing compared to the “Wait…what?” moment that followed. Right after she threw her jab at the next Speaker, she said this:

“I was the first woman speaker. It didn’t get that much play. And I’m not a publicity seeker, so it was OK with me. Boehner, before the election, they had him on the cover of Newsweek. Now he’s on the cover of Time, and women are coming to me and saying, ‘Is the job less important when a woman holds it?’

“My point is that when a man holds the job, the press seems to view it as more worthy of that kind of attention. But when a woman — even though it was historic — holds the job, they view it as less important. We have to dispel the notion that it’s not as big a job when a woman has it,” she said in a Q&A with the magazine.

Did you get that? Let me recap it for you. Nancy Pelosi said, without a twitch of conscience, that her humble nature and reticence for self-promotion hurt women. See, because the press just wouldn’t report on her historic reign as Speaker, women have been coming up to her, heartbroken that she wasn’t given the amount of attention she deserved. It’s not her complaint, you understand. she wouldn’t have mentioned it if not for these women driven to seek her out because of John Boehner’s face on a magazine cover.

I’ll give you a moment to pick your jaw up from the floor and put it back into place.

Of course, we remember that the fair Speaker never, ever promoted her mega-historic role as the first woman Speaker. She is, as she says, shrinking violet who eschews the spotlight and would never seek publicity by, say, staging a huge photo op on her very first day as Speaker or brandishing a gavel the size of a sledgehammer on the day she shoved Obamacare down America’s throat. We can perhaps forgive her, though, for a little personal history revision. After all, she has a self-image to retain and being on the wrong end of an electoral beating the likes of which we haven’t seen since before most of us were born can take the starch out of even the most egotistical politician.

What should not be forgiven is her contention that she “didn’t get that much play” as the first woman Speaker. Even the most hidebound hermit can jump on Google and find story after story after story about her tremendously historic ascendancy. The subject came up in nationally-televised interviews. Her hometown paper gushed over her like a platoon of tweenaged girls backstage at a Justin Bieber concert. Overseas, both the Guardian and the Economist dubbed her “the most powerful woman in history”. Even the blackguards at Time Magazine who would not give her a cover, spent more than a little bit of ink on her achievement. In short, unless you were living under a large and isolated rock for the past four years, you could not avoid hearing from the media that Nancy Pelosi was a walking, talking chunk of history in whose umbra we should be privileged to dwell.

We’re all adults here. We understand that politicians occasionally embellish the truth to make a point. That is the nature of politics. What Nancy Pelosi has forgotten is that there is a limit to how large and implausible a lie we are willing to accept. She needs to understand that while her rise to power was historic, so was the wave that swept her out of power. If she wants that power back, she’s going have to do better than a ridiculous fiction about how she didn’t get enough laurel wreaths laid on her humble brow. Otherwise, she’ll be remembered as a historical footnote, if she’s remembered at all.

Jimmie runs The Sundries Shack and has his own very entertaining podcast called “The Delivery”. He is also an amateur musician, an aspiring composer, an unrepentant geek and an avid fan of Twitter.