There’s a famous song about a San Francisco dame whose every stanza ends with the line, “That’s why the lady is tramp.” Frank Sinatra had a good time singing it to and about Rita Hayworth in Pal Joey. It was rather mean, but whatever he said about her the woman had class and he was the bum and everyone knew it.
Suddenly we have a successor song to that Rodgers and Hart tune. Except its final line goes, “That’s why the lady is a skunk.” Lady Nancy Pelosi, the reigning doyenne of San Francisco, a once-great city in irreversible decline, sure knows how stink up a joint. After a bit of open discussion in the Oval Office Tuesday afternoon, she soon enough turned on her host, but only after he was out of the picture and she was out of camera range. This is how the lady put it, according to a leaker: “It goes to show you: You get into a tinkle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.” That’s giving trash talk a whole new edge. Back in the day someone would have washed her mouth out with soap and water. But those days are gone, and if the Democrats’ new star, still known as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, allows it to happen, Lady Nancy will again become speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. That prospect alone gives Mr. Trump every incentive to keep government shut down indefinitely.
Incidentally, La Pelosi also questioned Mr. Trump’s manhood yesterday. Alas, she’s no Rita Hayworth.
Another Bay Area prima donna has embarrassed himself, months after he made it clear he had no use for Mr. Trump either. Little Stephen Curry, a great shooter and scorer on the local NBA champion Golden State Warriors team, announced back then he was not going to the White House because Trump is president. So Trump in turn disinvited him, and you can now see what it’s done to his mental make-up. Last thing we heard young Curry has announced he doesn’t believe the U.S. ever got to the moon. And there are other NBA stars with similar beliefs. Not even Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has gone that far, though maybe she never heard that we got there in the first place.
Elsewhere in today’s line up we can read about Mr. Jon Meacham’s inadequate performance as opening eulogist at the funeral of President Bush last week. But we also have a comment or two that needs to be made about Sen. Alan Simpson’s tribute to his friend George Bush. Don’t let Sen. Simpson’s folksy wit fool you too much. He also had some political points to make against his own party. They weren’t directed at the current president, but rather designed to defend President Bush for his most disappointing decision as president, when he broke his promise of promises on no new taxes. In best moderate Republican fashion, the choice in Simpson’s view, also ascribed to Mr. Bush, was to act not to one’s own political advantage but to what was good for the country, on behalf of what Simpson described as “a remarkable bill that dealt with two-year budgeting, entitlement reform, comprehensive and catastrophic healthcare, Social Security solvency, and much more. But required a critical ingredient called revenue.” And of course there was a co-conspirator: “Bob Dole, then a loyal warrior for George, took it back to the Senate and we won a very strong bipartisan vote.” And that’s when the trouble began, after the bill “went over to the House where his own party turned on him, surely one of the main factors ensuring his return to private life.” But the House, like the Senate, was still firmly in Democratic control. So the wondrous bipartisan bill passed easily enough. And did it deliver on all the goodies Simpson had just talked up? Darn it, bipartisanship never lives up to its billing, so long as there are Republicans in the House who oppose tax hikes that fail to decrease deficits and somehow always result in even greater spending.
Needless to say, we can presume Sen. Simpson’s remarks were music to Nancy Pelosi’s ear — she was of course in attendance — and she probably even admired them for the manliness they projected. Such a skunkette, this week’s Enemy of the Week.
