House Speaker Pelosi Compares Anti-Obama Demonstrations to San Francisco "White Nights"

A riddle: When is a violent gay-rights riot in San Francisco exactly like a popular protest against nationalized health care, big government, financial firm bailouts, and government ownership of two car companies. Answer: When the metaphor comes from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's imagination.

I'm not sure whether Nancy Pelosi was having a senior moment or an acid flashback when she faced the press and launched into a diatribe against mainly Republicans who are opposed to the Democrats' health care plan. Pelosi may or may not have known that there has been a tremendous amount of blowback from Democratic Party moderates whose position is most typified by Max Baucus and representing what amounts to a co-op plan with a long fuse leading to nationalized medicine. Pelosi said she could not support a plan without the so-called public option and then tried to scare people into supporting the Democrats and their headlong plunge into coast to coast, border to border statism.

Pelosi played at being the sage veteran of public violence in conjuring up the notion that conservative opposition to the government blitzkrieg was propelling America toward violence such as she'd seen back in 1979 on the streets of San Francisco. The riots during that period were termed the "White Nights" and followed upon the sentencing of San Francisco Supervisor Dan White to a seven year prison term for the murders of the San Francisco mayor George Moscone and another supervisor, Harvey Milk, a gay man. Okay, that was a light sentence for the murder of two men but, as Pelosi damn well knows, White got the death penalty anyway because he killed himself in the aftermath. But Pelosi was definitely on a flight of pure fantasy when the House Speaker referred to the current foul public mood and said the following:

"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. ... It created a climate in which violence took place. ... I wish we would all curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements and understand that some of the ears that it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statements may assume. ... You have to take responsibility for any incitement that [this] may cause."

http://sfist.com/2009/09/17/an_emotional_pelosi_evokes_harvey_m.php

There was a bit of sanity drift in the House Speaker's choice of words but we may condense them to mean "Chill the anti-health care discussion because it may lead to violence such as we saw in San Francisco in May of 1979." No matter that the only violence so far consists of a Democratic supporter who bit off the finger of a health care protestor several days ago and another incident in which a pro-choice advocate shot an anti-abortion activist to death. No matter that what Pelosi referenced in San Francisco of 1978 and 1979 was worlds away from a health care debate. No matter that she strayed out into a completely different solar system of interpretation. Pelosi's statement can only be construed as desperate and unfit for the dignity of her office.

Dan White was a boyish, clean-cut Vietnam veteran when he returned to San Francisco after his military tour of duty. He became a policeman, was active in community affairs, and was later elected as one of the city supervisors representing a mixed blue-collar and middle-class district. A patriotic Vietnam veteran in the San Francisco of the seventies was about as welcome in the city as the Bubonic Plague was in the middle ages. To comply with regulations, Dan White had to resign his police and fire jobs to serve as supervisor and eventually found it difficult to pay his bills. He resigned as supervisor in late 1978 so that he could earn money to support his family. His many supporters were disappointed, urged him to reconsider, and four days later received Mayor George Moscone's approval to continue serving the voters in his district.

San Francisco is a very liberal city by any measure and its supervisors were too. Supervisors Harvey Milk and Ruth Silver welcomed the occasion of Dan White's resignation to install a like-minded supervisor in his place and interceded with Moscone to stop White's return to the Board of Supervisors.

Aside from being more conservative than his colleagues, Dan White did not inflame, encourage, or engage in anti-gay rhetoric. Dan White's chief aide was a gay man and, long after Dan White's death, wrote an articulate long, detailed, and impassioned account of White's basic decency, tolerance, and sense of public service. The relationship between Dan White and Harvey Milk was generally amicable-until Dan White imploded under pressures and levels of sophistry he was not capable of understanding.

To evade security, Dan White went through a window of the San Francisco City Hall building to shoot Mayor Moscone dead. He then marched down the hall to shoot Harvey Milk. Later, he turned himself in to authorities. Several years later, after he was released from prison, Dan White is reported to have told a police detective that he intended to shoot Supervisor Ruth Silver, too.

During his trial, Dan White's attorneys presented what is now known as a "Twinkie Defense," the absurd claim that a sugary change of diet accounted for White's homicidal rage. It is likely that the jury did not actually buy into this absurdity but yet, after an accounting of the sequence of events and the poor state of Dan White's financial affairs, felt some sympathy for a man who, in a different city and in a different era, might have been welcomed to a supervisory board as a tolerant hero.

In a fit of Dan White's passion and rage, Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk were brutally gunned down. Justice demands suitable punishment. A manslaughter conviction and a seven year sentence was not anything that San Francisco's extensive gay rights activist community could accept and the riots, violence, and the May 1979 "White Nights" ensued.

How this sad series of events and San Francisco's White Nights rioting is connected to the anti-Obama protests continuing around the country is beyond comprehension. Perhaps House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was catalyzed by former president Jimmy Carter's characterizations of anti-Obama protestors as being racially motivated. The discrimination narrative proposed by Pelosi may perhaps be a clarion call to the gay community, that now is the time to militate against grievances imagined or real but mainly directed at change most Americans do not want, don't trust, and don't believe in.