Nancy Pelosi Bailout Bill Failure: A Tale of Two Timeses

This aut to interest you Brits.

Nancy Pelosi Bailout Bill Failure: A Tale of Two Timeses | NewsBusters.org

This is a tale of two Times. One Times, the one in New York, pretty much provided cover for Nancy Pelosi's highly partisan speech as a cause for the failure of the bailout bill to pass in Congress. The other Times, the one in London, gave an accurate analysis on how Pelosi's partisan rant caused the bailout bill to fail. First we have the New York Times, in an article written by Jackie Calmes, placing most of the blame for the bill's failure to pass on "evil" Republicans (emphasis mine):

From the White House to Congress to the presidential campaign trail, the principal players did not rally the votes they needed in the House. They appeared not to comprehend or address in a convincing way an intense strain of opposition to the deal among voters. They allowed partisan politics to flare at sensitive moments.

If there was any doubt that President Bush had been left politically impotent by his travails over the last few years and his lame-duck status, it was erased on Monday when, despite his personal pleas, more than two-thirds of the Republicans in the House abandoned the plan.


See, it was those wascally Republicans. Blame them despite the fact that Pelosi allowed 40 percent of her own Democrats to also vote against it. All she needed was just 12 more Democrat votes for it to pass. And the insultingly partisan speech by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Calmes wants us to believe that instead of her being incredibly undiplomatic at a time when Pelosi needed to rally support for the bill, the speech was just used by Republicans as an excuse not to vote for the bailout bill:

Representative John A. Boehner, the House Republican leader, became emotional as he urged his party to muster the will to approve the package. After his members overwhelmingly voted against it, he tried to shift the blame to a partisan speech delivered on the floor just before the vote by Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker.

Ms. Pelosi delivered the Democratic votes she had promised, but could not muster enough of them to avert a defeat that could long be remembered.


The assertion here is that Pelosi did her part by delivering the "Democratic votes she had promised." Left unsaid was the okay she gave to her Democrat allies that they could vote against the bill because she had enough Republicans, which she alienated with her partisan attack speech, lined up to vote for the bill. For the rest of this story on the failure of this bailout bill to pass, Nancy Pelosi's name is removed to the New York Times memory hole.

To get a much more accurate analysis on why this bailout bill failed, we must hop across to pond where the UK Times presents a much less biased picture detailing the incredible lack of basic political skills by Nancy Pelosi which helped lead to the bill's failure to pass:

It was perhaps the costliest ad lib in political history, 90 seconds of ill-judged, ill-timed bile that helped to kill off any hope of consensus on Capitol Hill.


Your humble correspondent believes the "ill-timed bile" lasted for quite a bit longer than just 90 seconds but I won't quibble over this otherwise accurate point.

That was the charge against Nancy Pelosi after Congress?s rejection of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan yesterday, a rejection that Republicans blamed directly on her aggressive and overtly partisan speech shortly before the vote.