The Patriot Post® · Nancy Pelosi's Monumental Double Standard

Ask House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about removing the historic Confederate statues from the halls of our nation’s Capitol building, and she’ll likely give you a spittle-flecked earful. But ask her about a certain Confederate-friendly former mayor of Baltimore, and she’ll suddenly have a plane to catch.

Perhaps it’s because that former mayor is her dad.

As The Washington Times reports, “Pelosi refuses to denounce her late father, former Baltimore Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., for supporting the erection of Confederate monuments in the city and perpetuating systemic racism by not stopping discriminatory practices, including refusing rental housing to black people in white neighborhoods. Mrs. Pelosi, who has made confronting the country’s past racism and combating systemic racism a cornerstone of the House Democrats’ agenda, refused repeated requests this week to address her father’s legacy.”

We’re not here to denounce the speaker for not denouncing her dad, though. We wouldn’t denounce our own dad under the same circumstances. What we will denounce Pelosi for, though, is her rank hypocrisy, which is there for everyone to see. It’s Pelosi, after all, who’s pushing the hard-Left’s racially divisive woke agenda through Congress — an agenda based on white guilt and black grievance. And it’s Pelosi and her fellow Democrats who encouraged the thuggery and mayhem of last year’s Black Lives Matter riots, and who said not a word about the concurrent statue-toppling orgy of their youthful Red Guards.

Check that. Pelosi actually did have something to say about all that. “People will do what they do,” she dismissively said when “protesters” in Baltimore, the city of her birth, yanked down a statue of the great Christopher Columbus, the first Italian American, and threw it into the city’s Inner Harbor.

Yet here’s what her dad said shortly after he took office, as he dedicated a Baltimore monument to Confederate icons Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson: “Today, with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions. We must remain steadfast in our determination to preserve freedom, not only for ourselves, but for the other liberty-loving nations who are striving to preserve their national unity as free nations.”

We can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and Jackson. Far less inflammatory words than those will get a guy canceled by today’s Left.

Of course, we conservatives judge historical figures against the moral standards of their day, while unhinged “progressives” invariably judge those same figures against the outlandishly woke standards of 2021. Put another way, they vilify Thomas Jefferson for not having been John Brown or Bill de Blasio. And in this case, long-ago Baltimore Mayor Tom D'Alesandro is little more than a typical politician having done the typical things of the day.

So no act of contrition or even acknowledgment will be coming from Pelosi, the hypocritical, holier-than-thou pol who exposed herself once and for all last year when she refused to apologize for her San Fran salon scandal. Indeed, at the time she actually had the chutzpah to demand an apology from the salon owner. “I think that this salon owes me an apology for setting me up. … As it turns out, it was a setup. So I take responsibility for falling for a setup.”

As for this D'Alesandro dust-up, it’s only a story because it involves a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do politician who refuses to condemn behavior that she’d otherwise condemn. As Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff writes, “Pelosi wants whites as a group not just to take responsibility for the complicity of some whites in racism, but to pay reparations to blacks. Yet, she won’t own up to her father’s complicity in racism — complicity that, for example, prevented blacks from obtaining housing in white neighborhoods. Call it white Speaker’s privilege.”

In any case, it’s good to see Nancy get a taste of her own medicine.