More Pelosi

On the Fox New panel last Friday, Mort Kondracke and Charles Krauthammer got into a brief back and forth about Nancy Pelosi. Kondracke proposed a way out for Pelosi in her current waterboarding mess. He said that she should review the actual records that the CIA has about the briefings held six years ago and admit that now that she was able to see the report, her memory has been refreshed and it turned out they really did say that waterboarding had been performed, sorry. Krauthammer responded saying that she couldn't do that because she has not only said that she didn't remember what had transpired, but that the CIA lied to her during the briefings. In other words, she claimed to have a distinct recollection of what actually happened and there could be no going back.
But Krauthammer had previously made a different point. Pelosi wouldn't be helped by what Kondracke suggests because even if she thought that waterboarding had not yet been performed, she should have objected to its potential use. That she didn't is even worse than finding out about it after the fact. After all, what's done is done. Even assuming she's not lying (a highly charitable assumption), the fact remains that she was silent during discussions about a practice she now abhors.

There's apparently no limit to Pelosi's dishonesty. Responding to the question of why she didn't register a protest to either the use or potential use of waterboarding six years ago, she said that she had supported a classified letter that Rep. Jane Harman, her successor on the House Intelligence Committee sent to the CIA in 2003. However, Harman's letter only addressed the issue of whether or not President Bush had signed onto the EIT program. (He had). It did not express disapproval of the techniques. Furthermore, Pelosi didn't even co-sign the letter.

Mark Steyn weighs in on Dick Cheney and Pelosi in his latest must read article. On Cheney.

He’s in favor of it (waterboarding). He was in favor of it then, he’s in favor of it now. He doesn’t think it’s torture, and he supports having it on the books as a vital option. On his recent TV appearances, he sometimes gives the impression he would not be entirely averse to performing a demonstration on his interviewers, but generally he believes its use should be a tad more circumscribed. He is entirely consistent.

and Pelosi

...is a contemptible opportunist hack playing the cheapest but most destructive kind of politics with key elements of national security

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmQ5ZTA3NDE2NjE3YTEyNjY3ZjJlNzQ2YzE1OWZkNjU=

And to beat a dead horse (or more accurately, a dead donkey), Rush Limbaugh had an apt description of Pelosi as she tried to retreat from her press conference Thursday. He likened her to a crab stealthily moving sideways trying to escape. Alas, the questioners wouldn't relent and she had to reluctantly return to the podium.
John Derbyshire felt unbridled joy watching that news conference, saying on Radio Derb that it would be "a bright, shining memory to be carried forward as a talisman against the darkness to come".