PELOSI FLOPS ON LAST DAY AS SPEAKER – AT 9:24 P.M. ET:  Reviews are pouring in from theater critics all over the world, and it appears that Nancy Pelosi has a flop on her hands.   They haven't even been able to sell the movie rights.

Pelosi, in an act of extreme ungraciousness, made an overly partisan speech as she handed over the gavel to John Boehner.  By tradition, the incoming and outgoing speakers make restrained, patriotic speeches.

As often happens, a British columnist, Janet Daley of London's Telegraph, makes the sharpest observations on our latest embarrassment:

Watching Nancy Pelosi’s startlingly inappropriate farewell as House Speaker, in which she turned what should have been a gracious constitutional ceremony into a blatantly partisan defiance of the electorate’s judgement, I wondered whether her fingers were actually going to have to be peeled off the Speaker’s gavel. She really is a piece of work: unrepentant and self-congatulatory to the end, even in the face of overwhelming repudiation by the voters. It was left to John Boehner, the new Republican speaker, to make the generous, bipartisan speech that was fitting for the occasion. How long that bipartisanship can last in a Congress so bitterly divided remains to be seen – but at least he behaved well at the outset.

Brit Hume, on Fox News, said this:

It was perhaps fitting that it took Nancy Pelosi longer to say her piece in surrendering the House gavel to John Boehner than it took Boehner to say his.  It was as if the nation’s first woman speaker could not quite believe today was not about her. She used her remarks to list the wonders of her party’s record, never mind that that record had led to one of the most decisive electoral repudiations in modern history.

COMMENT:  At least she's gone now.  She is, isn't she?  Check under your beds, your desks.

January 5, 2011