House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) failed miserably at an attempt to give a history lesson on the men who signed the Declaration of Independence at a press conference Tuesday.
Pelosi attempted to educate about the co-signers of the document at an eventfeaturing a new legislative package by Senate Democrats; instead, she accidentally read a discredited essay that was circulating on social media on Independence Day.
“The Price They Paid,” by Gary Hildreth, was debunked for numerous factual errors by Snopes and the Connecticut Star, and is only shared now as a over-dramatized tale meant to honor the heroes who founded our country.
Snopes debunks at least 11 obvious errors in the essay, while Brooke Harlowe, a professor at Susquehanna University, delves deeper into the errors, calling the piece a “good story but an inaccurate portrayal of our founders.”
Not having received the memo, Pelosi read the entire essay from her phone, pointing to the words while accompanying them with dramatic hand motions and words of inspiration.
“Understand what our responsibility is to protect what so many people sacrificed so much to achieve for our country,” she said.
Cringe.
This is almost as bad as that time Pelosi read words from the Declaration of Independence at a conference thinking it was the Constitution:
And so, it was 165 years ago, 165 years ago. Imagine the courage it took for those women to go to Seneca Falls and do what they did there, to even leave home without their husband’s permission, or father’s, or whoever it was. To go to Seneca Falls, and to paraphrase what our founders said in the Constitution of the United States: they said the truths that are self-evident, that every man and woman, that men and women were created equal and that we must go forward in recognition of that.
Yup. Those were Pelosi's actual words. And here are the Declaration of Independence's actual words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That was 2013, and this is 2017. Four years — and not a lesson learned.
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