Pelosi Redefines Hypocrisy and Destroys #MeToo for … Biden?

It's not hypocrisy: it's a lie.

In 1665, François Duc de la Rochefoucauld famously opined, “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

That definition may have been witty at the time, but seems a bit feeble in our era, when Nancy Pelosi states she absolutely believes Joe Biden didn’t sexually assault Tara Reade and she will not “answer this question again.”

As we know, that contrasts with the Pelosi who until recently was repeatedly reciting the “believe all women” mantra, as was Biden himself.

But this doesn’t make Pelosi an actual hypocrite as described by Rochefoucauld or anybody else. It makes her a bloody liar (twice over).

In the first place, no matter what she said, she didn’t “believe all women” any more than she or anyone would believe all men. (Neither did Biden, we can hope.) Only an imbecile would—and Pelosi is no imbecile. She is an unremitting power-driven political operative and a successful one, quite willing to lie at a moment’s notice to achieve her goals.

And that’s what she did. Saying she believes all women was a totally expedient lie at the time, not mere hypocrisy, which is too weak.

Lie No. 2 is, despite what she says, she doesn’t have any idea whether Biden is guilty of sexually assaulting Tara Reade, irrespective of how long she has known him. (Would she have expected that Ted Kennedy would have left a woman drowning in a car?) As any reader of Dostoevsky or Henry James can tell you, human behavior is far too various to be easily predictable.