The left has come under fire for their overheated rhetorical attacks on Donald Trump.
After the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise by a Bernie Sanders supporter, Trump and other politicians preached that hateful political rhetoric must end.
But Nancy Pelosi ignored that advice and shocked observers with her comments.
Pelosi was pressed about the hyperbole Democrats employ when talking about Trump and other Republicans.
Rather than accept fault for creating a climate of hate, Pelosi lashed out.
She blasted Republicans as “sanctimonious” for daring to ask that Democrats cut out hate-filled attacks and drop the conspiracy theories that drove a paranoid madman to try and assassinate Republican members of Congress.
And, of course, Pelosi threw in a shot at Donald Trump.
Breitbart reports:
Thursday at her weekly news conference, when asked about negative discourse playing a role in the shooting of Republicans practicing for a congressional charity baseball game, which critically injured House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Republicans began the current level of coarse political rhetoric attacking President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
She then pointed to then-candidate Donald Trump joking at a campaign rally, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Pelosi said, “Let’s all say, let’s examine our conscience, let’s see how we can rid ourselves of our negative attitudes that go to a place that is like this. We’ve had—it didn’t used to be this way. Somewhere in the 1990s, Republicans decided on the politics of personal destruction as they went after the Clintons and that is the provenance of it and is what has continued. Again, I feel as if we’re having a family moment that is very, very serious and we’re talking about things that we can say, the discussion—save the discussion for another day. When you have a president that says, I can shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and nobody would care, when you have people saying, beat them up and I’ll pay their legal fees, when you have all the assaults that are made on Hillary Clinton, for them to be so sanctimonious is something. I really am almost sad that I had to go down this path with you, because I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to have the fullest discussion of it. And it will be for another day. It will be for another day.”
But Trump and the Republicans did not inspire this madness.
The shooter hated Trump.
He shared a change.org link calling Trump a traitor.
And the pumps that fed his rage were primed by daily stories in the so-called “mainstream” media that falsely claimed Trump and his team were in cahoots with Russians.
Democrats have to own the hatred they are stoking in their base.
Liberal journalist Michael Tracey wrote on Medium:
“If you deny that the kind of overblown rhetoric that Democrats have specialized in over the past months—warning about traitorous subterfuge and foreign infiltration—can have any trickle-down effect on regular people, you’re deluding yourself.”
Democrats have never believed in personal responsibility.
But now it’s going beyond the Democrats’ belief that people are entitled to government handouts, they are excusing their own role in fostering an environment where a member of their party thought political assassination was an acceptable means to achieving political ends.