More Idoicy from Madam Pelosi

[DBCooper]

idiocy - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

I guess it is a spelling error for which I am prone to do from time to tmie.....last word intended.

[Zebra Top]

So, is the consensus that Robert wasn't being snarky with his comment? If so, I will remove my Groan.

[DBCooper]

No I think he was right on..... snarky maybe but thats life under the big top. It is surprising sometimes how the eyes of most of us can overlook or correct spelling without us knowing it.

[RanchHQ]

Originally Posted by Robert

what's 'IDOICY' ?

It made sense to me, after I asked a 13 y/o:

Urban Dictionary: idoicy

[RanchHQ]

I've been away all afternoon, some spent on a big green tractor and some spent on a big brown horse.

So, now Madam Speaker says this whole deal is "Bush's Fault".

It is a shame we are not celebrating the success of our Men and Women in the CIA, FBI, State Department Security, and all the other Government Agencies that specialize in keeping us safe.

They have done far more, at greater risk, than Madam Pelosi(D-CA).

The latest:

Pathetic: Pelosi plays down CIA criticism, blames Bush instead
POSTED AT 7:07 PM ON MAY 15, 2009 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

After a week of increasingly desperate, cowardly excuses, she saved the best for last. Mind-boggling.

“We all share great respect for the dedicated men and women of the intelligence community who are deeply committed to the safety and security of the American people,” she said in a statement issued by her office. “My criticism of the manner in which the Bush Administration did not appropriately inform Congress is separate from my respect for those in the intelligence community who work to keep our country safe.

“What is important now is to be united in our commitment to ensuring the security of our country; that, and how Congress exercises its oversight responsibilities, will continue to be my focus as we move forward.”

I don’t know what she could possibly mean by this after yesterday’s “the CIA misleads us all the time” sandbagging unless she’s now accusing Team Bush of pulling aside the agents in charge of briefings and ordering them to lie. Which is insane given that (a) by her own admission, agents did brief Congress about waterboarding Abu Zubaydah by early 2003; (b) in the political climate of the time, with Democrats gung ho to prove their “toughness” on terrorism, Bush had less to fear that they’d be squeamish about waterboarding if he told them than that they’d be enraged if he didn’t tell them because he thought they might be squeamish; and (c) according to Pelosi’s logic here, if this is all just another of the Bushitler’s conspiracies, then her failure to mention it until now means she’s been essentially covering for George Bush.

I don’t think she’s accusing Bush of anything here, actually. This statement is no more or less than her way of waving the white flag, eating her words about the CIA before she does any more damage or stumbles into any more idiotic non sequiturs about creating jobs in response to torture queries, and mindlessly dumping the whole thing in the lap of the left’s all-purpose villain. She gives up. It’s all Bush’s fault, even if it isn’t. No further questions, please.

At least Steny Hoyer claims to believe her now, even if the White House doesn’t. Needless to say, the longer this drags out, the more reminiscent it is of the Democrats’ turn on Iraq. When Pelosi had an opportunity to act and stop something she (supposedly) thought was wrong, she kept her mouth shut good and tight lest it jeopardize the party’s chances at the polls in a time of war. Now, after the die is cast, she wants truth commissions and investigations and tribunals to purge the guilt and please her base. Too bad the left is so stridently opposed to “preemptive” action; it would have saved them a lot of grief six years ago.

LINK: Hot Air Blog Archive Pathetic: Pelosi plays down CIA criticism, blames Bush instead

[RanchHQ]

A fairly long piece by Mark Steyn. I thought about just posting a Link but then again I thought the whole piece should be here for all to read.

I guess I could have posted it under Lisa T.'s thread re: Vice President Cheney and the size of his ego but it fits better here.

Mark Steyn shows the abhorrent Politicizing of our National Security by the Liberal Wing of The Democrat Party:

"Watching the Democrats champing at the bit last week, I thought perhaps we could cut to the chase and handcuff Cheney and Pelosi to a radiator in the basement of a CIA safe house somewhere."

Fun with Dick and Nancy
Cheney has been entirely consistent on waterboarding. Pelosi has not.

By Mark Steyn

Uh-oh. Nancy Pelosi’s performance at her press conference re waterboarding has raised, according to the Washington Post, “troubling new questions about the Speaker’s credibility.” The dreaded T-word: “troubling.”

I doubt it will “trouble” the media for long, or at least not to the extent of bringing the Pelosi speakership to a sudden end — and needless to say I’m all in favor of Nancy remaining the face of congressional Democrats until November 2010. But her inconsistent statements do suggest a useful way of looking at America’s tortured “torture” debate:

Question: What does Dick Cheney think of waterboarding?

He’s in favor of it. 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.
Question: What does Nancy Pelosi think of waterboarding?

No, I mean really. Away from the cameras, away from the Capitol, in the deepest recesses of her (if she’ll forgive my naivete) soul. Sitting on a mountaintop, contemplating the distant horizon, chewing thoughtfully on a cranberry-almond granola bar, what does she truly believe about waterboarding?

Does she support it? Well, according to the CIA, she did way back when, over six years ago.

Does she oppose it? According to Speaker Pelosi, yes. In her varying accounts, she’s (a) accused the CIA of consciously “misleading the Congress of the United States” as to what they were doing; (b) admitted to having been briefed that waterboarding was in the playbook but that “we were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used”; (c) belatedly conceded that she’d known back in February 2003 that waterboarding was being used but had been apprised of the fact by “a member of my staff.” As she said on Thursday, instead of doing anything about it, she decided to focus on getting more Democrats elected to the House.

It’s worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts, Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That’s not an airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law. As National Review’s Andy McCarthy points out, under Section 2340A(c) of the relevant statute, a person who conspires to torture is subject to the same penalties as the actual torturer. Once Speaker Pelosi was informed that waterboarding was part of the plan and that it was actually being used, she was in on the conspiracy, and as up to her neck in it as whoever it was who was actually sticking it to poor old Abu Zubaydah and the other blameless lads.

That is, if you believe waterboarding is “torture.”

I don’t believe it’s torture. Nor does Dick Cheney. But Nancy Pelosi does. Or so she has said, latterly.

Alarmed by her erratic public performance, the speaker’s fellow San Francisco Democrat Dianne Feinstein attempted to put an end to Nancy’s self-torture session. “I don’t want to make an apology for anybody,” said Senator Feinstein, “but in 2002, it wasn’t 2006, ’07, ’08, or ’09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks.”

Indeed. In effect, the senator is saying waterboarding was acceptable in 2002, but not by 2009. The waterboarding didn’t change, but the country did. It was no longer America’s war but Bush’s war. And it was no longer a bipartisan interrogation technique that enjoyed the explicit approval of both parties’ leaderships, but a grubby Bush-Cheney-Rummy war crime.

Dianne Feinstein has provided the least worst explanation for her colleague’s behavior. The alternative — that Speaker Pelosi is a contemptible opportunist hack playing the cheapest but most destructive kind of politics with key elements of national security — is, of course, unthinkable. Senator Feinstein says airily that no reasonable person would hold dear Nancy to account for what she supported all those years ago. But it’s okay to hold Cheney or some no-name Justice Department backroom boy to account?

Well, sure. It’s the Miss USA standard of political integrity: Carrie Prejean and Barack Obama have the same publicly stated views on gay marriage. But the politically correct enforcers know that Barack doesn’t mean it, so that’s okay, whereas Carrie does, so that’s a hate crime. In the torture debate, Pelosi is Obama and Dick Cheney is Carrie Prejean. Dick means it, because to him this is an issue of national security. Nancy doesn’t, because to her it’s about the shifting breezes of political viability.

But it does make you wonder whether a superpower with this kind of leadership class should really be going to war at all. Over at the New York Times, the elderly schoolgirl Maureen Dowd riffed off Cheney’s defense of waterboarding and argued that, no matter when the next terrorist attack comes, the former vice president would be the one primarily responsible. He is, she said, “a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America.”

Really? Last week, while Speaker Pelosi was preoccupied with her what-did-I-know-and-when-did-I-know-that-I-knew-it routine, the Daily Telegraph in London reported what is believed to be the second mass poisoning of Afghan schoolgirls, this time at Ura Jalili High School for Girls in Charikar. Fifty students had to be hospitalized after a mysterious “poison gas” infected the classrooms. As you may recall, under the Taliban it was illegal for girls to attend school, and Afghan insurgents have made a sustained effort to make the price of female education too high. So, in an effort to identify the poison, blood samples have been taken to Bagram air base to be analyzed by the U.S. military, taking time off its hectic schedule of mass torture.

Does waterboarding so outrage the Muslim world that it drives millions of young men into the dark embrace of al-Qaeda? No. But the media fetishization of U.S. “torture” is certainly “a force multiplier” for Muslims who don’t so much “hate” as despise America, not least for its self-loathing.

One of the few U.S. commentators to pick up on the Afghan schoolgirls story was Phyllis Chesler, who wrote about it under the headline “The High Cost Of Western Idealism.” America and its few real allies fight under the most constrained and self-imposed rules of engagement ever devised, and against an enemy that rejects every basic element of the Geneva Conventions. Perhaps we are so rich, so smart, so advanced that we can fight with one arm and both legs tied behind our back and still win — eventually. Along the way many innocents will suffer. But better that than that a Gitmo detainee with a fear of insects should have a caterpillar put in his cell.

Watching the Democrats champing at the bit last week, I thought perhaps we could cut to the chase and handcuff Cheney and Pelosi to a radiator in the basement of a CIA safe house somewhere. But on reflection this would be an unacceptable level of torture. It would be ungallant to say for whom.

LINK: Fun with Dick and Nancy by Mark Steyn on National Review Online

[RanchHQ]

Looks like we will never know if The CIA or Madam Speaker Pelosi(D-CA) was telling the big whoppers.

The Democrats blocked any effort of a Bipartisan Panel to look into the question.

Instead the Democrat controlled House will be working on " the real issue of creating jobs and making progress on health care, energy and education,"

Oh, ok.

House rejects probe into Pelosi CIA claims

By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, May 21, 2009
House Democrats on Thursday defeated a Republican push to investigate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's assertion that the CIA misled her in 2002 about whether waterboarding had been used against terrorism suspects.

Democrats in voting 252-172 to block the measure, which would have created a bipartisan congressional panel. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, sponsored the resolution.

"This is partisan politics and an attempt by the Republicans to distract from the real issue of creating jobs and making progress on health care, energy and education," said Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami.

Pelosi was not present at the time of the vote. Republicans called for it while she was giving a commencement speech at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Earlier this month, Pelosi told reporters that she had not been told that waterboarding had been used against terrorism suspects, even though it had been. President Barack Obama and human rights groups have said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, is torture.

"To have this charge out there and not have it resolved I think is damaging to our intelligence efforts, and certainly will have a chilling effect on our intelligence professionals around the world," said House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney also stepped into the debate.

In a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Cheney said Pelosi and other lawmakers had been briefed on the interrogation techniques on "numerous occasions."

"In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists," Cheney said.

Pelosi has asked the CIA to declassify information supporting her claims.

The CIA has sent lawmakers its notes and memos on 40 congressional briefings on the interrogation techniques. But that document has been found to include several errors.

CIA Director Leon Panetta acknowledged in a May 6 letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, that the CIA's list may not be completely accurate.

"In the end, you and the committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened," Panetta wrote.

Democrats are pointing out that Republicans also have accused the CIA of misleading them on intelligence matters. Boehner himself called into question the soundness of the intelligence community when it determined in 2007 that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program.

Boehner told reporters on Thursday that it was an unfair comparison because he never accused the men and women of the intelligence community of misleading Congress.

House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters in a separate Capitol Hill news conference that he supports creation of a panel to investigate the nation's interrogation policy. What the CIA told Congress and when could be part of that, he said.

But the Republican-drafted proposal was a partisan jab meant to distract from the question of whether the Bush administration tortured war prisoners, he said. Hoyer called the resolution another example of Republicans engaging in "politics of personal destruction."

Boehner defended the harsh interrogations.

"I don't believe the enhanced interrogation techniques were wrong," he said.

LINK: House rejects probe into Pelosi CIA claims

[DBCooper]

It is time for Nancy to resign.

[Maximus]

Did you hear the press conference today? Nancy has nothing more to say about it and now she is going to go out and save the world now.

And if you get a chance, listen to her responses to press questions today. She broke the Speaker of the House record for the most fragmented sentences and made up words in a 2 minute span.

So far she gets an "F" on how she is handling this. This lady is serously lost.

[Birdieman]

It's just a matter of time before they bust out the straight jacket, she is certifiable. Amazing how people can see this circus and still think the left is on the right track.