An Open Letter to the Republican Witch Hunt Cabal
Oh good for you Republicans: You demand ‘substance” from Pelosi. Well, where's YOUR substance?
Expressions of mock outrage by righties never cease to amaze me. You Republicans are always fiercely down on any notions of political correctness, and yet when you sense an opportunity to be politically correct in order to let Democrat blood, you use your own double standards to go on the attack against Democrats and act as if you really cared about Nancy Pelosi's political honesty or not,especially after your party's hyper crooked political record.
You decry Democratic contemptuous dismissal of your party’s witch hunt as ‘name calling’ but you folks with your parade of name callers like Newt Gingrich, Michael Steele, John Boner and Mitch McConnell and all your hate radio jocks have your own problems with name calling, since you all use it as a weapon, consistently calling your opponents "traitors, liars, corrupt, thugs" and words like that on a regular basis. So point number one is you yourself call names, why can't I?
Second and more important point: Why do you “nopers” act as if it were already fact that Pelosi is lying about her being misinformed by the CIA being the reason she signed off on the torture policy. You turn that assumption into a bargaining chip and turn around and demand of Democrats "proof" that Pelosi ISN'T lying.
It is difficult to understand why you think you are owed proof of her truthfulness as your argument to try and shut up Democrats vis a vis whether the the CIA is telling the truth? Whatever the truth is, either way, will come out in time. And while you're at it, why don't you 'pubs' provide US Democrats with proof that the CIA DIDN'T lie? We don't owe you a defense of Nancy Pelosi. No matter what could ever be said, you'd find a way to call it 'bogus'. It is the old shell game of demanding proof that isn't immediately available one way or the other, and then rejecting any statements as invalid because one doesn’t offer unobtainable documentation on the spot.
Even if Democrats had a signed, sealed and delivered documented proof of Pelosi being right, you would characterize it as "no good" anyway, so no "proof" can ever be given that you would accept. You are not interested in the truth. You are interested in being political hit artists.
Now as for the matter of Pelosi’s agreement or lack of it regarding torture, even in the unlikely circumstance that she was given a thorough, complete briefing and that she embraced and signed off on it, then in that case OK, she could then be characterized as a politician like many Republican politicians, who regularly lie their way out of political difficulties.
The progressives have no real love of Nancy Pelosi anyway after she refused to stand up to George W. Bush during his riding roughshod over America about the War in Iraq. No matter whether she lied or the CIA did, there's the same shame on her then as on Republicans who did and continue to do the same, like Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and they get away with it. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush NEVER have been faulted or prosecuted for quite a lot of evidence in existence that they have lied about their own misdeeds. So why the sudden GOP witch hunt on Nancy Pelosi even on the unlikely chance she has been as mercenary as Republicans often are in their lies?
I want you cons to prove to me that she IS lying and was not indeed misled by the CIA with cherry picked information....not your suspicions, PROOF. Let alone my asking you what is the GOP's proof that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney shouldn't be in jail at this very moment. as well as most of the former Bush Administration.
Shame on Nancy if she lied but even IF that were the case, whe would not be the first politician that has done so to save their skin. Democrats don't claim sainthood anymore than anyone else.
But shame on you duplicitious Republicans for having the hypocrisy to demand proof about a Democrat’s record, but you don't seem to care about your own party's many crimes or offering any justification for those.
I guess it matters to you who does the lying. So, even IF you succeed in changing our national dialog from important substantive issues like national health care to whether Nancy Pelosi were in fact lying, for which the jury is still out, that would merely serve to obstruct debate temporarily on urgently needed national business and would merely redound to her political discredit, Again, that is, IF she is not being truthful in her explanation of events. Look at John McCain. He is a master of lying to cover his own rear.
No, the real issue why the Republicans can’t focus on something important for our country is that they are obstructionists and don't care about our national wellbeing. Their political opportunism and sore loser mentality mean more to them than America's survival.
So onward with the hypocrite party's political marksmanship. And in the event that Pelosi were found to have parsed her record, she could solve the political problem by just switching to the Republican Party and she would then fit right in with any blameshifting game. After all, finger pointer in chief, Gingrich, has a score of dirty deeds in his own background, one of which is having lied about his taxes and was faulted by the Senate ethics committee for it. He was eventually pressured to step when his notoriety was hurting the GOP. Today he is a re-invented self-serving, hypocrite, calling names at others when he is a cockroach himself. But back to this GOP-Pelosi hunt.
Unless we all have an obsession with the current Speaker of the House, who cares? In 2003 Pelosi was a member of the MINORITY party, relatively powerless in the shadow of the Bush administration's bullying of anyone who criticized the war following 9/11. She was not even the ranking member of the House Intelligence committee, and, like other politicians who are briefed on matters of national security, she agreed obligatorily to stringent restraints of confidentiality. Does anyone think that in that political environment any objections she raised to the policy would have changed anything anyway?
One thing the GOP forgets is that a lot of people on the left are not happy with not merely Pelosi but many in the Democratic Congressional leadership for their being way too PASSIVE about opposing Bush policies. The ones who did say something risked being branded traitors, like John Murtha was if they said anything. So a lot of Democrats, eager not to appear unpatriotic, in the atmosphere of Republican patriot-baiting, probably didn't say enough. Many of us progressives think that is so, but maybe their actions could at least have some extenuating circumstances given the political atmosphere of fear and initimidation being created by the Bush Administration and their loyalists in Congress.
Politics often involves expediency in order to keep one's career from being derailed. One could wish on both sides of the aisle that one's duty to country were not subordinated to political considerations, but why is Pelosi at fault for doing what most congresspeople on both sides of the aisle do: namely cover their own you-know-whats.
In the final analysis, you hypocrite Republicans make a pointless argument. The most that the worst case scenario you are trying to conjure up can hope to achieve is to do what Republicans are so good at: ruining someone’s reputation. The GOP uses as a prime tool its practice of besmirching others' reputation while ignoring the glass house Republicans live in, daily ignoring their own crimes while projecting their guilt onto Democrats.
Suppose Pelosi does become exposed as a politician whose public statements are tailored to put the best face possible on her past actions and motivations. Imagine! You don't think just about every Republican politician out there doesn't do that too? Oh, we’re all shocked! On the other hand, if it turns out that the administration and the CIA lied in THEIR presentation (we know the Administration did) when it entailed the future of America and the biggest mistake ever made by an American president, going to war over NOTHING, under LYING and FALSE PRETENSES, then THAT DOES have significance. Anything Pelosi may or may not have done is venial compared to the deliberate malfeasance YOUR party engaged in.
You Republicans always find some distraction to push as a "cause celebre" when you need to change the subject from a discussion of the criminality of the Bush administration to an irrelevant sideshow of Nancy Pelosi.
The decision to use torture was not Nancy Pelosi's, and the sooner we ask what George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, et al, knew and when they knew it and why they lied to the American people about WMD’s to get into the war, the sooner we'll get answers that REALLY MATTER as to why our country is sinking into the mess it is in and who is responsible for it.
You Republicans show your political opportunism, your hypocrisy and your pettiness in making an issue of Nancy Pelosi. This as you see it is your best chance to take a shot at Barack Obama’s reform agenda. Getting Nancy Pelosi to step down would be a setback for the Democrats and THAT is why you ‘nopers’ are pushing it. As I can see, you Republicans are politically motivated cultists who just object because you are sore losers from being turned out of power and rightly so by the American people.
You hunt like a dog pack, howling and baying when you think you smell blood. You don’t care about America or helping us all out of this terrible time of crisis. You only care about political ‘gotcha’. I hope and believe the public sees this latest GOP tempest as the political cynicism that it is. But Obamas win of the White House and the Congress getting almost a filibuster-proof majority has made the GOP mad. And the dog that snarls loudest is the one the rock hit.
