Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a press conference yesterday, and it was a memorable performance. We'll leave the memorial duties to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, the Beltway's Sultan of Snark:
The speaker of the House had just read a statement accusing the CIA of lying and was trying to beat a hasty retreat from her news conference before reporters could point out contradictions between her current position and her previous statements.
"Thank you!" an aide called out to signal an end to the session. Pelosi walked, sideways, away from the lectern and, still sidling in a sort of crab walk, was halfway to the door when a yell from CNN's Dana Bash, rising above the rest of the shouting, froze her in the aisle.
"Madam Speaker!" the correspondent called out. "I think there's one other question that I would like to ask, if that's okay."
"Sure, okay," Pelosi said, in a way that indicated it was not okay. Pelosi had no choice but to sidle back to the lectern.
Over the next few minutes of shouted questions--"They lied to you? Were you justified? When were you first told? Did you protest? Why didn't you tell us?"--the speaker attempted the crab-walk retreat again, returned to the lectern again and then finally skittered out of the room.
Everyone knows by now what happened: Pelosi was encouraging the Angry Left as it demanded retribution against Bush administration officials for their efforts to protect America from terrorist attacks in the wake of 9/11. Now that she has been exposed as complicit in those efforts, she is reaping the whirlwind of hatred that she helped stir up. And she is going to war with the CIA--a war in which even someone with much more intelligence than Nancy Pelosi would be vastly outmatched.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124240080663224141.html
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"Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly." --Robert Schuller
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
