It was the most damaging moment of then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s (R-Wis.) 1954 Army-McCarthy Hearings. After McCarthy leveled one more lie about the communist leanings of one more innocent victim, attorney Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the U.S. Army, stood and stared at McCarthy and asked: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Today, those same words resonate in Congress, now directed at leaders of the Republican Party: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Judging by the way they’ve responded to the savage assault on Paul Pelosi, apparently not.
Before you put on your Republican Party body armor and bristle with partisan outrage, slow down and consider this. Say you were off on a business trip. In the middle of the night, while you were out of town, an intruder broke into your home, made his way to your spouse’s bedroom, and struck him or her in the head with a hammer, knocking them unconscious and sending them to the hospital for emergency surgery.
How would you feel if, while you were in the ICU praying your spouse would survive, some leaders of your community blamed your spouse for the attack, made jokes about it or denied it even happened? That shouldn’t happen to you or anybody else. It shouldn’t have happened to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her family, either. But it did.
No sooner had word of Paul Pelosi’s injuries hit the wires than the right-wing disinformation machine kicked into high gear: This was a Democratic “false-flag” operation staged to get voters’ sympathy just before the midterms; Pelosi knew his assailant and welcomed him into his home; Pelosi and suspect David DePape were gay lovers involved in a love spat.
You expect that kind of looney-tunes from people on the fringe. Some people still insist Sept. 11 was an inside job. But with Paul Pelosi, those nutty conspiracies didn’t stay on the fringe. They were picked up, repeated, validated and, in some cases, expanded by leading Republicans.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) dismissed DePape as a “nudist hippie male prostitute.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who at first called the attack on Pelosi “horrific,” soon joined the fringe by tweeting: “I suspect none of us will ever know for sure” what happened at Nancy Pelosi’s house. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) actually blamed it on Paul Pelosi. “He should have been a gun owner and shot his attacker,” she told a political rally.
And after baselessly claiming “It’s weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks,” former President Trump, the king of conspiracies, told radio talk show host Chris Stigall that the glass in Pelosi’s back door was actually broken from the inside, “so it wasn’t a break-in, it was a break-out” — a claim directly contradicted by the official San Francisco Police Department report.
Now here’s the worst of all. Yes, there were a few top Republicans, notably former Vice President Mike Pence and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who expressed sympathy to the Pelosi family. Yet, in a shameful show of political cowardice, none of them took the next step — to condemn the sinister theories put forth by elected members of their own party. By their silence, they’ve allowed those ugly conspiracies to continue to spread and amplify.
For Kevin McCarthy and others, it shouldn’t be that hard. Simply tell their members: “Knock it off! Stop spreading those ugly rumors. They’re not true, they’re wrong, and they’re painful.” But, of course, that presumes they have any sense of decency left.
Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”