Lesley Stahl can’t just embarrass herself with fawning Democrat interviews on 60 Minutes. Now they’ve put her on Sunday Morning with her hero Nancy Pelosi. Substitute host Tracy Smith introduced the gush with gush: “Her interview with the House Speaker Emerita that has a new book out, The Art of Power, an art which Nancy Pelosi is something of a master.”
Pelosi started with the implausible claim that she and her husband Paul Pelosi have never discussed the traumatic hammer attack on him in their San Francisco home. Naturally, she noted her family blamed Republicans for casting her as a devil with cloven hoofs and horns on her head. She blamed Trump, as CBS helpfully played a clip of Donald Trump mocking him at a rally.
Then she added that she didn’t really run a pressure campaign to force out President Biden. She insisted she never made one phone call about it. (Okay, she told everyone he had to go, face to face. That makes a difference?)
STAHL: She mentioned his many accomplishments, including his forceful leadership of the NATO summit with other Western heads of state.
PELOSI: He was in a good place to make whatever decision, top of his game. Such a consequential president of the United States, a Mount Rushmore kind of president of the United States. Want to know what comes next.
STAHL: Are you really saying that he belongs up there on Mount Rushmore? Lincoln and Joe Biden?
PELOSI: But you got Teddy Roosevelt up there, and he’s wonderful. I don’t say take him down, but you can add Biden.
Stahl just had to follow up that comedy with flattery: “If there were a Mount Rushmore for Speakers of the House, Nancy Pelosi would certainly be up there, commemorating her 20 years as a commanding leader in Congress.”
After listing “accomplishments” like Obamacare and Covid policy, Stahl then predictably turned to January 6, and once again, Pelosi was only a target and not to be held accountable for anything, especially the Capitol Police shooting rioter Ashli Babbitt to death. That never comes up.
STAHL: And the dark day of January 6th. You, in the book, talk about hearing the crowd saying, Nancy, Nancy! “We’re coming for you, bitch,” is what they said. You knew what was happening that day was directed at you.
PELOSI: And the vice president. It was an insurrection instigated by the president of the United States. He now tries to disassociate himself from it, blaming it it on me and everybody else, but that’s the way he is. This was instigated by him.
Then she followed up with the Pelosi family propaganda, as filmed by her daughter Alexandra for HBO, in which she said she would punch out Trump if he came to the Hill, and gladly go to jail. But CBS enabled Pelosi by not discussing the newly emerging clip from those family sessions, where on that day, the Speaker took “responsibility” for the unreadiness of law enforcement. Democrats and their media allies can’t let the Republicans change the narrative.
