I come before you today with a warning. Nancy Pelosi is a threat to the democratic future of America, possibly even more so than Mitch “The Evil-est Turtle” McConnell, or even the overgrown toddler in the White House.
Some of you may be surprised to hear that. “Isn’t Nancy Pelosi super progressive?” you ask, full of ignorance. No. No she is not. Oh, sure, she’s ok when it comes to not locking children in cages, or not shooting gay people in the street. But when it comes to the policies that really mark a true progressive warrior…well, she’s more like a Republican.
But wait!, you shout in defiance of all logic. She totally voted to condemn Trump’s repugnant tirades against “the Squad” (Ilhan Omar, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, & Ayanna Pressley, all recently elected actual progressive warriors). Yea, ok. She also spent the past few weeks engaged in a bitter Twitter war of her own with them. What was that war about again? Oh yea: it was because AOC and “the Squad” are exposing her as the corporatist shill that she is, and she’s upset.
Her Record, Part I
Here, I’ll let you decide if Nancy Pelosi is really the “far left progressive” that the mainstream media really wants you to believe she is. I’m going to list a handful of issues for you. These are basic, staple issues that any true progressive upon seeing would go “yea, no brainer bro. I’m for this and I fight for it”.
- Medicare For All
- Universal Education (AKA free college)
- SAFE Act (would introduce new voting regulations to assure each vote counts and dramatically reduce likelihood of outside election tampering)
- Eliminate ICE
- Impeach Trump
- Stop America’s endless wars and warmongering
Take a guess on how many of these Nancy supports. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Done? If you guessed “none” , you’re right! But wait, it gets worse: she’s even gone so far as to vote against some of these when they’ve been up for consideration in the House, most notably the SAFE Act. Gee, I wonder why a corrupt incumbent would want to keep our voting system unsecured. Real mystery, that one.
Perhaps most damning is her continual and heated resistance to Medicare For All. In 2019, going into the 2020 election, this is the issue being debated. Not that all the other issues aren’t important. They are. But ask any random person what their top issue is and I guarantee you there’s at least an 80% change they’ll reply with “healthcare”.
In my post about the Overton Window, I discussed how the conversation about healthcare is shifting. That’s entirely due to real progressives fighting for it. Nancy Pelosi, however, is still trying to make sure it never happens. Why? Oh look, she’s taking money from Big Pharma & the Health Insurance Mafia. Doesn’t really seem like something a real progressive would be doing.
Her Record, Part II
Money seems to be Pelosi’s favorite thing, not helping her constituents or the American people as a whole. Check out this article and this article, both detailing how she’s got big dollar donations out the ass. So much so that the donors threatened to stop donating to the DNC if she wasn’t re-elected as Speaker of the House the last time the position came up for vote.
This is money corrupting politics in the worst way. We expect people like Mitch “Darth Tortoise” McConnell to do the bidding of whatever donor comes his way. But Nancy Pelosi is supposed to be fighting for us. Yet her campaign donation pages read like a who’s who of Wall Street.
So what does she support, then? Glad you asked, theoretical Pelosi supporter who is for some reason still reading this. Check out this list:
- The Patriot Act (AKA: lets just give the NSA a free pass to spy on everyone and everything)
- Entering the Iraq War (AKA: let’s illegally invade a country that didn’t attack us)
- Re-Authorizing the Patriot Act (see first entry, but for longer this time)
- Falling for obvious GOP ploys to kill anti-war legislation (The Yemen Resolution; in brief, allowed Republicans to introduce an anti-Semitism amendment to the bill which gave Mitch “Flip Him Over and See if He Can Get Up” McConnell an excuse to reject the entire bill, all because of fabricated outrage over an out-of-context quote by Ilhan Omar)
- Allowing ICE to continue operating its concentration camps (Do I even need to say anything here? They’re keeping children in dog cages)
- Most egregiously (and recently) handed the GOP a baseball bat to attack progressives with in 2021 by helping to pass the debt ceiling deal (I can’t even do justice to this atrocity. Read about it in detail here)
Yea….not really the kind of person I’d ever call “progressive” or even “a Democrat”. Nancy Pelosi is a straight up Republican, specifically an 80s-90s Republican.
How Can We Stop This Madness?
So, you ask, newly converted to progressivism, how do we get rid of her and make things better? Good question. Fortunately, I have an answer for you. And that answer is DEMOCRACY BABY.
You see, Nancy’s up for re-election in 2020. And this time she has a real challenger. A man of the people. A Real Progressive.
Meet Shahid Buttar, the man seeking to do the seemingly impossible and unseat Nancy Pelosi. He’s the real deal, people. Don’t take my word for it though; just look at his record. In his tenure serving San Francisco, Shahid has:
- Aggressively advocated for same-sex marriage (before it was cool)
- Fought against the warrantless surveillance allowed by the Patriot Act (hey, who voted for that, again? I feel like we just talked about that)
- Spoke out for immigrant rights, pro-choice rights, holding police accountable for their actions, and so much more I can’t even list here.
He’s running on progressive issues that Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t even look at if she passed them in the street, much like the homeless people that her policy decisions have created all over the country.
But seriously, whereas Nancy Pelosi has only disdain for the common American whose pockets lack the required depth to have their voices heard, Shahid is a true man of the people. He would never dream of sucking up to big corporations in exchange for a fat check. No, he gets his support from the grassroots.
And never fear, panicking Pelosi supporter, Shahid is even better than Pelosi ever was on social issues, too. So he’s the whole package, not just a watered down consolation prize. For the full list of his platform check out his website. And while you’re there, maybe make a donation. Every bit helps!
The time has come for change. Real, substantive change. The people are fed up with incrementalism and the status quo. “The Squad” being elected proves that. Let’s keep the momentum going into 2020 and beyond.