With both guns blazing at an extraordinary press conference today, the Democrat from San Francisco made good on that, accusing the CIA of lying when the agency said she was told about torture in 2002.
In doing so, Pelosi turned a distraction into a conflagration. She had little choice after two weeks of Republican accusations that it was she who was lying, accompanied by a leaked CIA timeline that said she had been briefed on Sept. 4, 2002, that "enhanced interrogation techniques" - a euphemism for torture - "had been employed."
Democrats quickly closed ranks behind the speaker. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made clear whom she believes.
"I've know Nancy a long time," Feinstein said. "We lived a few houses apart for couple of decades. I've never known her not to be truthful. Let me put that on the record
I want to say right off the bat that I do not consider Nancy Pelosi to be a liar. She is stupid. She is a fool. She is a moralizing loudmouth. She is a natural-born scold who lives to denounce her enemies as being evil and "unamerican." She is the spoiled daughter of a urban machine pol, and the rich wife of a glad handing huckster. She wants the rest of us to drive 3 foot long smart cars while she jets around with a military escort. She has the political instincts of the Queen of Romania and the personality of your least favorite aunt. But she is not a liar. I will give her that.
I guess we will now wait for the inevitable push back from the CIA. Did the Agency lie to Nancy? Who knows? The real problem with the CIA is not its lies. It's the long, unblemished record of disastrous errors it has made in its analysis and then passed along to policy makers. Frankly, lying would have been an improvement.
Still, Pelosi's foolishness has been on full display today. She has been moralizing grandly about torture, and feeding off of the political catastrophes wrought by the Iraq War, for so long that she has forgotten what life was like for Democrats between 9/11 and, say, 2005. Back then, Dems were at a distinct disadvantage. In 2002 and 2004, they became the first opposition party to lose congressional seats in decades because voters simply didn't think they had the legal or philosophical stones to wage the War on Terror. Tom Daschle - the one-time Senate Majority Leader - lost his re-election campaign. So did the dubious war hero Max Cleland. No one was talking about "torture" back then, unless you were from the Cynthia McKinney (another election loser) wing of the party.
It's one thing to denounce the "torture" of the guys who helped plan 9/11. But to think that it is a winner politically? That is beyond foolhardy. Only someone as insular and foolish as Pelosi could have thought this was a good idea. To throw the gasoline of "the CIA lied" on to the fire only compounds her thick-headedness and the damage to her own political fortunes
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