Below The Beltway

Speaker Nancy Pelosi,who had previously called the people protesting President Obama’s health care reform plan as “Un-American,” now compares them to the guy who murdered politicians in California in 1970s:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday said she worries that the protests of President Obama’s health-care legislation may be of a similar nature to anti-gay rhetoric in the late 1970s in San Francisco, which culminated in the assassinations of two of her home town’s political leaders.

Pelosi, responding to a question about anti-Obama sentiment, said that partisans on all sides of an issue have the right to voice their opinion. But after pausing, she added: “I have concerns about some of the language that is being used, because I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco. This kind of rhetoric was very frightening, and it created a climate in which violence took place.”

Republicans rejected this assertion and accused her of likening protesters to Dan White, a member of the city’s board of supervisors who killed Harvey Milk, the first openly gay member of that board, and Mayor George Moscone in 1978.

“The speaker is now likening genuine opposition to assassination,” said Rep. Pete Sessions (Tex.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Such insulting rhetoric not only undermines the credibility of her office, but it underscores the desperate attempt by her party to divert attention away from a failing agenda.”

Pelosi was a local Democratic Party leader at the time of Milk’s and Moscone’s deaths, and the usually stoic speaker appeared to fight back tears as she recalled the killings.

Here’s the video:

The problem with Pelosi’s argument is that the murders of Milk and Moscone had nothing to do with politics:

White was tried for first degree murder with special circumstance, a crime which potentially carried the death penalty in California. White’s defense team claimed that he was depressed, evidenced by, among other things, his eating of unhealthy foods (inaccurate media reports that White’s defense had presented junk food consumption as the cause of his mental state, rather than a symptom of it, would give rise to the legal term “Twinkie defense“). The defense argued that White’s depression led to a state of mental diminished capacity, leaving him unable to have formed the premeditation necessary to commit first-degree murder. The jury accepted these arguments, and White was found guilty of the lesser crime of voluntary manslaughter.

As Ed Morrissey notes, though, facts don’t matter to Pelosi:

It wasn’t political debate that drove Dan White to commit murder. He was a lunatic. At his trial, White tried to evade responsibility for his acts in part through arguing that he had a diminished capacity caused in part by his diet, which led to it being ridiculed as “the Twinkie defense.” White only got sentenced to a short term in prison, which was a grave injustice. He should have gotten two life terms for the murders, which was a good argument for a better approach in California to law and order.

Milk and Moscone’s murder has nothing to do with political debate, and no one other than White was responsible for the murders. Pelosi wants to silence opposition since she cannot outargue it, and her implied references to the murders of Milk and Moscone as somehow comparable to political opposition to the Obama administration is flat-out despicable.

In other words, par for the course for Pelosi.