In her declining years, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Malaprop) is turning into an embarrassment for the Democratic Party, an institution formerly believed to be incapable of shame.  Best of all for Republicans: They can't get rid of her.

A lifetime of power and privilege that began as the daughter of the mayor of Baltimore has accustomed Pelosi to stringing together political slogans, platitudes, and catchphrases as a substitute for political thought.  Her forte has always been fundraising and the use of those funds to build a personal web of influence among fellow Democrats, all whom are accustomed to seeking money more than wisdom in their interactions with her.  Seldom is she ever corrected by her own side, and the mockery of her opponents matters not a whit.

As a result, the minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives sallies forth on a regular basis and utters idiotic dicta, with no meaningful feedback loop to self-correct her verbal output.  She actually thinks she is making sense.

...especially when speaking to local media from the San Francisco Bay Area, where absurdities uttered by a politician are a requirement for political victory.

Patterico via Popehat spotted this gem that slipped out when Pelosi spoke to Pam Moore, of local all-news station KRON-TV in San Francisco, about her desire to deny a permit to the Patriot Prayer group's free speech rally on Saturday in the Presidio of San Francisco.  The embedded video takes less than 20 seconds:

INTERVIEWER: How could the Park Service justify denying that organization their free speech rights?

PELOSI: Because the Constitution does not say that a person can shout, yell wolf in a crowded theater. If you are endangering people, then you don’t have a constitutional right to do that.

"Crying wolf," of course indicates raising alarm about something that is not a threat at all – perhaps like a group led by a nonwhite man who denounces racism and featuring mostly nonwhite speakers, for the purpose of affirming the importance of free speech.  There is a lot of "crying wolf" going on in San Francisco, on the part of Peloisi and her allies in the San Francisco political machine that has given us Pelosi and Senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Kamala Harris.

Pelosi continues to be able to raise so much money that the Democrats will have a hard time getting rid of her, even though she stands as a continuing reminder to the nation of two of the fundamental flaws in the Democratic Party.  The first is the vacuity of the Democrats' political thinking and its reliance on meaningless platitudes, so interchangeable that their leaders sometimes insert the wrong one.  But they're all the same, anyway.

The second is that Pelosi is an apt symbol of the corrupt bargain that party has made with the digital and financial oligarchs to buy the support of a vast dependent class and seize the reins of political power in the name of compassion, or something, as the plutocrats get richer and the middle class declines.  Her husband (who "prefers a low profile") has managed to build a vast fortune while she wielded political power, including a trophy property multimillion-dollar estate in the Napa Valley.