Pelosi's Hairpocrisy Is a Distraction

So America is all abuzz about ...

Image by U.S. House of Representatives, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Nancy Pelosi's hair!?

CNN's Chris Cillizza -- no man of the right -- upbraids Pelosi for stepping in it with her visit -- unmasked of course -- to a hair salon in California, which has been locked down for months. She was caught on a security camera, and the owner, whether she's a conservative or simply someone fed up with being denied a livelihood for so long, happily turned the footage over to Fox News.

Cillizza thinks this was a dumb move by someone otherwise astute at what passes as political strategy these days, and maybe he does have a point. After all, as Scott Adams put it dryly , "If you wanted to win the suburban female vote in the United States, one good way would be to make every hairdresser in the country hate the other party."

And yet...

Some of us find frightening the prospect of the Democrats controlling the Presidency and both houses of Congress; we already find cold comfort in the alternative of Trump or his party winning again: The best you can say is that we can't trust them to try to destroy the energy sector, attack entrepreneurialism, place the entire nation under house arrest, or gut our police departments.

They certainly aren't making strong, principled cases of their own against any of these things -- let alone for liberty. One would imagine Pelosi's (and Biden/Harris's) policies would be easy to rally persuadable voters against, but they weren't doing that before. And, so long as we keep litigating what Pelosi (unsurprisingly) did, we won't have that conversation any time soon. In fact, by focusing on her hypocrisy, the whole question of whether what she claims to be good really is good gets swept under the rug. (This is not to say that hypocrisy isn't serious; it's just not where the conversation should end.)

Of course Nancy Pelosi is a hypocrite. And yes, it is asinine to insist that someone in a room by herself wear a mask. But Pelosi's real sin is her long history of undermining our liberty. That's what we should discuss -- not whether she's a hypocrite or whether she was tricked or misinformed about whatever the current decree about masks is in San Francisco.

But what really takes the cake is so many people taking solace in Pelosi's exposure as a hypocrite. Her opponents feel relieved of the need to address her party's positions, and her allies -- to the extent that they are unhappy with the results of the policies she supports or has helped put into practice -- can avoid the reckoning they have brought on themselves, and about which they were warned long ago:

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.

Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it:

The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.

Pelosi knows this, and I am sure that, deep down, she is more than happy to let them talk about my hair, so to speak.

-- CAV