RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nancy Pelosi’s visit to a hair salon, closed by law because of COVID, is one of those small incidents that illustrates a larger, more troubling problem.

It shows how insiders like Pelosi are allowed to play by a different rules than the rest of us. Worse, they think they are entitled to receive this preferential treatment. That’s what people hate, with good reason, about powerful politicians, celebrities, and billionaires.

Pelosi has plenty of company. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot visited a closed salon herself and caught some flak. Her lame excuse? Lots of people look at her. When the dangerous demonstrations that rage across the city moved toward her residential block, she deployed police to stop them. Her justification? She and her family deserve safety. They certainly do (and more than most because she represents us and is subject to more threats). But what about everybody else in Chicago? Don’t they deserve something better than broken windows, looted and boarded-up stores, free-fire zones in bad neighborhoods, and a city prosecutor who sits on her hands crying “social justice”?

In Seattle, we saw the same hypocrisy and entitlement when the city councilors who voted to defund police added extra security for themselves, at taxpayers’ expense. In New York, we saw it when celebrities coming to the Video Music Awards were allowed to skip the 14-day quarantine imposed on other travelers.

How the Media Plays Stories Like This

Will the Pelosi story have legs? Probably not. The country’s major news organizations are now deeply partisan. They bury stories that hurt their cause, and her cause is their cause.

The flagrant bias exhibited by so many once-reputable outlets has consequences far deeper than Pelosi’s blow dry. It means the Washington Post, which did so much to uncover Watergate, has maintained radio silence on the scandals surrounding the Obama-era FBI, Department of Justice, and CIA.

They are ignoring the problems now emerging with Robert Mueller and Andrew Weismann’s investigation. Was there a proper legal basis for their work? Did they hide exculpatory evidence? Did their FISA warrants break the law? Was it part of a larger, concerted assault on Trump’s election and then his presidency? The Post, New York Times, and other mainstream media are avoiding these questions, just as they avoided Devin Nunes’ serious probe of the investigators’ abuses. They were too busy repeating Adam Schiff’s worthless stories about Russian collusion, contradicted by the sworn testimony he kept hidden.

This willful blindness means those Pulitzer Prizes, given out for “deeply sourced reporting” about these major stories, are risible. But nobody should be laughing. The joke is on us.