Nancy: The Hits Keep Comin’ [UPDATE: Boehner Ups The Ante]
By SusanUnPC on April 27, 2009 at 5:05 PM in CIA, Congress (House & Senate), Elizabeth Warren, Intelligence, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, TARP, Torture
(bumped up and updated extensively)
HOT UPDATE: John Boehner is taking it right to Nancy, proving that “what goes around comes around,” and that Obama just did NOT think through the torture memo “blowback.”
Politico‘s Glenn Thrush reports that Rep. Boehner is “asking the Obama administration to release CIA notes taken during a 2002 briefing session with Pelosi and other Congressional leaders.”
Even “Dear Abby” could have given PBO the advice he needed: “THINK!. And make a careful list of the pros and cons, including the possibility you’ll throw your own party leaders under the bus (!). Your MoveOn and Kossack rabblerousers are NOT deep thinkers! Seek the counsel of savvy, experienced men and women.”
Obama’s increasingly heavy reliance on D.C. novice David Axelrod is folly. All Axe envisioned was Republican blood in the water. But Axelrod has NO background — none, zippo! — in Capitol Hill politics warfare. Rahm? Does he think with his gonads or his brain? Methinks that, like Obama, he’s more politician than legislator, and he probably didn’t recall that both Democrats and Republicans attended those intel meetings in 2002. But now it’s too late, the water is bloodied by Democrats and Republicans alike, and here we go:
Boehner is backing efforts by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking member on the House intelligence committee, to release agency’s records of meetings with Congressional members from both parties.
The GOP is hoping to spotlight the fact that Pelosi and other Democrats raised few objections when told about details of the Bush administration “enhanced interrogations” of terror suspects.
“Congress and the American people deserve a full and complete set of facts about what information was yielded by CIA’s interrogation program, and they deserve to know which of their representatives in Congress were briefed about these techniques and the extent of those briefings,” says Boehner, backing Hoekstra’s letter to DNI Dennis Blair.
He adds: “To date, the administration has fallen short in providing this information.
Mr. Hoekstra’s request to Director Blair is straightforward, and the information he is seeking is essential. The American people have been provided an incomplete picture of exactly what intelligence was made available by the interrogation program. It is now the Administration’s responsibility to ensure they are given the full picture — including which members of Congress were briefed on the methods and how extensive those briefings were.”
EARLIER POST:
When one attempts to obsure, deflect, and outright prevaricate as much as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one can expect critics galore. And that’s just what’s happened. Politico‘s Glenn Thrush has been hammering Nancy hard. This article was published less than an hour ago:
“Pelosi playing defense on torture“:
Nancy Pelosi didn’t cry foul when the Bush administration briefed her on “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects in 2002, but her team was locked and loaded to counter hypocrisy charges when the “torture” memos were released last week.
Many Republicans obliged, led by former CIA chief Porter Goss, who is accusing Democrats like Pelosi of “amnesia” for demanding investigations in 2009 after failing to raise objections seven years ago when she first learned of the legal basis for the program.
Had President Obama and team THOUGHT through the blowback from their we’ll-have-it-both-ways approach to the torture memos, they’d have immediately realized the can of worms they were opening for members of their own party. Furthermore, Obama’s failure to look at the entire chessboard is endangering his other programs:
Pelosi finds herself on the defensive at a time when she needs to be on the offensive, pushing through a record-breaking budget, health care reform, a controversial cap-and-trade proposal and a supplemental funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Someone on Pelosi’s staff spoke anonymously to Thrush:
“As soon as the president made the decision to release [the memos], I was telling people that the Republicans were going to come after us, saying she knew about it and did nothing,” said an adviser to Pelosi (D-Calif.), speaking on condition of anonymity. “And I’m sure we’re going to get hammered again when they release all those new torture photos,” the person said.
Republicans are grateful for the gift:
But Pelosi’s allies were less prepared to confront the fallout from her convoluted answers during three sessions with reporters last week — answers that raised new questions and handed Republicans a fresh line of attack on a speaker at the height of her power.
“I’m puzzled, I don’t understand what she’s trying to say,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and currently the committee’s ranking minority member.
“I don’t have any sympathy for her — she’s the speaker of the House; there should be some accountability. She shouldn’t be given a pass,” added Hoekstra.
Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) promised to keep up the heat, telling reporters last week, “She and other leaders were fully briefed on all of these interrogation techniques. There’s nothing here that should surprise her.”
This next quote left me both flabbergasted and infuriated — because the Dems’ main concern seems to be how they appear in the media, not whether what Pelosi did and said are right or wrong:
“The Republicans may have won a news cycle, but we’re doing what we want to do,” said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly, pointing to Pelosi’s legislative successes during President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office.
Check Memeorandum.com for blog posts related to Thrush’s article.
For more on Nancy Pelosi’s modus operandi, see “On Pelosi’s Duplicity and Apparent Sandbagging of Elizabeth Warren.”
This attack piece proves how Pelosi and other Democratic leaders let Bush have his way with TARP and ceded ENORMOUS control to the Treasury Department. Now that Elizabeth Warren is analyzing and describing the real problems with TARP, Pelosi is maneuvering to cut her off at the knees. It’s quite a read.
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