House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just couldn’t control herself yesterday, savaging President Bush and blaming “right-wing ideology” as the sole cause of the nation’s fiscal turmoil.
Whereupon bipartisan compromise legislation intended to resolve the nation’s financial crisis went poof.
And then the stock market posted its single largest one-day point loss ever.
Not surprisingly, Pelosi and Democratic leaders like Barney Frank and Rahm Emanuel immediately blamed the GOP for the bill’s defeat, asserting that Republicans had put their “hurt feelings” above the nation’s interest.
Talk about putting lipstick on a . . . well, on a politician.
The fact is, 95 Democrats – 40 percent of the party’s House membership – voted against the bill.
Pelosi – who allegedly controls the chamber – couldn’t even deliver her own members. How humiliating is that?
Republicans at least had long-standing philosophical objections to a massive expansion of government power over the economy. And, frankly, Pelosi’s boneheaded speech sure didn’t help matters.
But what of her disloyal Democrats?
Clearly, they’d bought the demagogic rhetoric of people like Pelosi and Frank, that the $700 billion rescue plan constituted a “bailout of Wall Street.”
Yet as responsible parties, from President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen on down, have repeatedly made clear, this is a rescue of Main Street from the crippling effects of a potential meltdown of the nation’s credit markets.
Even as they chanted the mantra of bipartisanship, the Democrats have worked mightily from the outset to spin the crisis for political advantage.
Yet there’s an old political maxim: Don’t gloat before they vote – and Pelosi did just that.
Now lawmakers are at each other’s throats and Wall Street is in panic mode.
Heck of a job, Nancy.