Copeland's Corner: November 2, 2022
The only thing sicker than the attack on Paul Pelosi is the response by the Republicans and their mouthpieces.
In one of the most egregious cases of political violence during my lifetime, on Friday, 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, husband of current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by a violent conspiracy theorist in the couple’s San Francisco home. Pelosi was struck multiple times with a hammer, the blows causing severe injuries to his hand, arm and cracking his skull rendering him unconscious. After undergoing emergency surgery, as of this writing, Mr. Pelosi is resting and expected to make a full recovery.
42-year-old David DePape faces both state and federal charges for the attack. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has charged him with attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, false imprisonment of an elder, residential burglary and threats to a public official and their family. On Monday, the Justice Department filed charges including one count of assault of an immediate family member of a United States official with the intent to retaliate against the official due to the performance of official duties and one count of attempted kidnapping of a United States official due to performance of official duties. Conviction on the federal counts alone will land DePape behind bars for up to fifty years.
In a voluntary interview with San Francisco police over the weekend, DePape admitted that he broke into the home with the intent of kidnapping Speaker Pelosi, holding her hostage (he brought zip ties with him) torturing her and “interrogating” her. If she told him “the truth”, he’d let her go. If she didn’t, he intended to break her kneecaps so that she would have to conduct House business in a wheelchair, thus sending a message to other elected representatives that there would be “consequences” for their legislative actions.
A deep dive into DePape’s writings of the last several months shows that he was heavily invested in the QAnon nonsense, Pizzagate (the whack job theory that Hillary Clinton and her associates are holding small children in the secret basement of a Washington D.C. pizzeria and sexually abusing them) as well as a laundry list of other ludicrous blather spewed by the far right fringe of the Republican Party. Which at this point is the Republican Party.
To me, the only thing sicker than the attack and the attacker is the response by the Republicans and their mouthpieces. With crime being near the top of the list of concerns of midterm voters, they are trying to place the blame for this attack on either the Democrats, President Biden, “random crime” or Mr. Pelosi himself.
Kari Lake, the local news anchor turned right wing Arizona gubernatorial candidate told Fox “News” host Laura Ingraham that “people are realizing policies of the left have made our streets more dangerous. They’re realizing that the crimes, whether they be a small crime where your car’s broken into to a violent attack, it’s because of leftish elected officials who have not enforced the laws.” Never mind the fact that the Republican Party and its far-right wing have been demonizing and dehumanizing Nancy Pelosi as a boogeyman to its base for nearly two decades now. As if the steady drumbeat of blaming her for everything from ants ruining your picnic to baseball game rainouts played no part in the radicalization of this kook.
GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has recently accused Speaker Pelosi of “treason” which she said is “punishable by death,” tweeted, “Violence and crime are rampant in Joe Biden’s America. It shouldn’t happen to Paul Pelosi. It shouldn’t happen to innocent Americans. It shouldn’t happen to me. (Swatted six times, violence and death threats every day). Whether it’s Atlanta, Chicago, New York or San Francisco, we need to fund and support police and end the deadly nationwide crime.” This from a woman who “supports police” so much that she calls the insurrectionists who attacked, maimed and murdered police on January 6, 2021, “patriots.”
Greene isn’t the only one who tried to make Mr. Pelosi’s attack about herself either. There’s former GOP congressman and Trump acolyte Devin Nunes who tweeted, “Where were the Democrats and Pelosi when people were outside my home with my young daughters in the home and my wife by themselves?” I must have missed the part where Nunes’ home was broken into by these alleged people and his family violently assaulted. I guess I didn’t see the news that day.
Some tried to play down the severity of an 82-year-old man having his skull bashed in with a hammer. Fox “News” host Jesse Watters said that he wants DePape treated like he’d “attacked anyone else. Because a lot of people get hit with hammers. A lot of people get attacked and they’re out on bail the next day and it’s simple assault.” As though extreme violence as part of a plan to kidnap and torture the Speaker of the House of Representatives is the same as assaulting “anybody else.”
Some Republicans found humor in the attack. The aforementioned Kari Lake joked about the security at the Pelosi home during a fundraiser over the weekend. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out a picture of a pair of tighty whities and a hammer claiming they were his “Paul Pelosi Halloween costume.” GOP Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin joked to a crowd that Republicans would send Nancy Pelosi “back to be with her husband in California.”
Probably the most dangerous response was that of the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, who retweeted an article to his 13 million followers from the Santa Monica Observer that claimed that Paul Pelosi was on drugs at the time of the attack and that DePape was a male prostitute. The Santa Monica Observer is the “news outlet” that reported in 2016 that Hillary Clinton was dead and had been replaced by a body double. Musk deleted the tweet after enormous blowback.
Surprisingly, the only major right-wing figure not to pile on is the very one responsible for the incivility we now live with. Donald Trump has not uttered a word about the attack as of this writing.
Just when I think that these cretins can’t go any lower, they manage to surprise me. I keep waiting for a Joseph Welch, Army/McCarthy Hearings, “At long last have you no shame” moment, but it’s not coming. There is no shame. There is no empathy. There is no compassion. Just hate, greed and power grabbing. And these are the people that polls say Americans are prepared to hand control of our legislative body to next week.
Lord help us all.