A Shirley Jackson reference –excellent! Do they still read “The Lottery” in junior high, I wonder? I still remember our seventh grade trifecta: “The Lottery,” “The Crucible,” and “The Hairy Ape.” Some parents were upset.

One of my favorite authors.

We need to support Nancy in this. I’m tired of the game playing – the Rs just yell and scream until someone believes them. Enough!

Does she weigh the same as a duck?

Unfortunately, the decades of institutional rot have instilled the right-leaning tendencies that have hardened into clots in the nations political bloodstream. Surgery is required at this point.

She turned me into a NEWT!

But I got better.

On the whole, I can’t really say I give a shit about the fate of Nancy. If she’s burned at the stakes because of this, then so be it.

I’m not sure “we” need to do anything here; “we” were rigorously ridiculed and ignored when “we” wanted Nancy to stand up for the rule of law and consider the injustice being done by the very policies of which Nancy was aware at the time (whether she specifically knew the details of who and when they were torturing is really beside the point entirely), and which she largely accepted without much protest when it mattered. “We” naive lefties were told to f&*k off and mind our own business while the important cocktail wiener crowd busied themselves with matters of state.

I think “we” DFHs should stay f*#$ed off and let Nancy and her serious beltway buddies slug this one out. You reap what you sow.

Sure, you got better, but what about that Gingrich fellow? He’s stuck that way!

I’m in agreement re Pelosi. She cooked her own ass when she was told about the waterboarding and kept her mouth shut…oh and lied about what she knew. Now she’s facing the music. Consequences, baby. Hope and change. Live the dream.

Of course the wingnuts are exploiting an opportunity to paint all liberals as collaborators in their torture party. They have about as much chance of success as they did winning the election and holding on to moderate republicans. Oh look, another one has defected.

The right-wingers are counting on the lefties to hate her. That’s why they’re making her into the Bright Shiny Object here — because by destroying her, they hide their own criminality.

Don’t fall for their scam. Instead, remember that Pelosi’s not the only one calling the CIA liars — as Marcy’s documented over and over again, lots of other folks, including Bob Graham (who got the CIA to admit that they were wrong and he was right about when and if certain briefings occurred).

As I just told thingwarbler:

The right-wingers are counting on the lefties to hate her. That’s why they’re making her into the Bright Shiny Object here — because by destroying her, they hide their own criminality.

Don’t fall for their scam. Instead, remember that Pelosi’s not the only one calling the CIA liars — as Marcy’s documented over and over again, lots of other folks, including Bob Graham (who got the CIA to admit that they were wrong and he was right about when and if certain briefings occurred).

Exactly right, PW. I usually come to TBogg to crack my ass up, but IMO this is a hugely important point that most people seem to be overlooking. Whatever anyone thinks of Pelosi, this torture disgrace is Not. Fucking. About. Her.

As long as Pelosi is arguing in favor of full investigations, then I’m OK with her. They (the righties, some at CIA, the usual suspects) are trying to intimidate her into keeping quiet, and we need everyone to talk. I’m hoping that it continues to backfire.

PW, I quite agree that this is largely a storm cooked up by the desperate rethugs in an attempt to get the finger pointed at a softer target than themselves. All the same, wasting time and energy “defending” or “supporting” Nancy Pelosi seems ridiculous — she’s a big girl, and she’s got the entire D machinery backing her ass; if nothing else (and Lord knows, it doesn’t seem capable of much else) one would hope that the machinery could be put to good use in a situation like this.

I’d much rather continue to focus on the back story itself and hold Obama to his key campaign promises about transparency and accountability, which in turn — in a sane, hope-y change-y universe — should lead us back to the perpetrators of war crimes in the previous administration. But if he’d rather duck it all by sacrificing Nancy Pelosi as a scapegoat, then I’m afraid we’ve got much bigger problems ahead…

The Republiscum Party is desperate and will latch like a mindless pitbull on anything it thinks might give it a leg up.

Gunning for Pelosi, though loathesome, could work in the Democrats’ favour though. In the interest of clearing her name, Pelosi is calling for a commission to investigate the events that led to the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation methods. Wingnuts are impossibly dumb: Although they won’t back off attacking Pelosi, they’re immensely fearful of a formal enquiry, whether it clears her name or not. The more they attack her the more ammunition she has to demand an enquiry. That she is asking for one bodes well for her. That they oppose, what most people would view as reasonable, bodes ill for them.

Republicans know an enquiry would have a brutal impact, but not on her. Regardless of whether it clears her name – though I think it would – an enquiry will shed further light on this shameful chapter of Republicanism and bring increased shame to the torture apologists who don’t seem to have a know-when-to-shut-the-fuck-up mechanism.

Pelosi is being dragged through the mud and it’s essential her name be cleared. Let the howlers howl. The more they howl, the more weight can be brought to investigate THEM.

So far the press can only offer up they said/she said and…doesn’t anyone take minutes at these official top secret torture briefings?

According to this timeline, Pelosi’s current account is consistent with statements she made in 2007. Additionally, she concurred with a letter of protest against waterboarding in 2003. Additionally, Panetta has stated he can’t vouch for the accuracy of the CIA’s account.

[Insert sound of me eating harsh words posted earlier.]

With a meat ax.

The target audience isn’t us lefties, it is the MSM and they have taken the bait hook, line, and sinker. The intent is to “taint” the Dems so that they press will assert that they cannot possibly investigate the Bush administration because their own hands are dirty. This prospect, of course, delights the MSM since their own hands are in dire need of a good scrubbing.

Man tbogg. Your snark is right on point. This is the best precis of the situation I’ve seen so far.

aimai

I’m not sure I follow that line of reasoning: if Pelosi is thoroughly marginalized thru this exercise in finger pointing by Newt Gingrich and his fellow felons (amplified by their ever-obedient servants in the MSM), then surely Nancy’s call for investigations is going to be easier to dismiss as the rantings of a has-been bag lady with a credibility problem.

Moreover, with the Administration increasingly dragging its feet on any genuine investigation of the past, won’t this simply make it easier for Obama to team up w/ so-called moderate Republicans to put on some investigatory bi-partisan kabuki (a commission, a report, some hand-wringing and a few grandiose proclamations about “never again”) and call it a day?

What else floats? Very small rocks.

Maureen Dowd, that Villager, has changed her mind re: “looking ahead instead of backward” and declares in Sunday’s column that we must investigate. The Daily Beast column is having an impact. I’m a little more optimistic.

What thinkwarbler said. I lost respect for Pelosi when she took impeachment off the table. She needs to earn it back before I step up to her defense.

If as some say the pressure will force granny Pelosi to start an investigation, and I think it will, then maybe maybe maybe the Wuss Party will see that going on offense is a winning strategy. OTOH, if they don’t go on offense here, they never will, and we’re doomed to be Gooped sooner rather than later.

I must weigh in and add my thanks for TBOGG’s succinct and totally apt take on the Pelosi affair. I do think she could help her own cause better, by being more firm and assertive in her responses and not taking back everything she says: like retracting on the blame CIA bit (nothing wrong with that and IMO Panetta didn’t exactly call her out)to now saying it was the Bush Administration which lied, not the CIA.

Agree with Aronaut about the Dem’s Wuss quotient. Maddening, so maddening.

But if Pelosi floats, she’s a witch. BURN HER!

But seriously, where was Bush’s X-ian Base during this whole torture fiasco? Oh, wait–they were being “PATRIOTS!”

At least we have the fearless Harry Reid!!

Oh, has the old Harry Reid been replaced with a robot simulation? I hadn’t noticed any changes. Of course, you could replace Reid with a robot and there wouldn’t be anything to notice, anyway…

If as some say the pressure will force granny Pelosi to start an investigation…

Pelosi herself is pressing for a formal investigation.

Frank Rich writes:

No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

America will not move on if this shit isn’t dealt with.

Nancy brought her problems upon herself. On behalf of her client, Israel, Nancy and Harry Reid conspired with the Republican leadership to obstruct justice with her illegal meme: “impeachment is off the table.”

She was a co-conspirator, enabling of the Cheney Administration to to pull off a successful coup on behalf of his Shadow Government compatriots in league with Israel and the NWO. Israel subsequently used its Mossad wiretaps to facilitate blackmail – as evidence of the Administration’s complicity in 9/11 was used to blackmail the Shadow Government and its co-conspirators (Congress).

Israel double-crossed the Administration, then the Administration double-crossed Pelosi after having carried water for them throughout the entire 8 years to keep impeachment “off the table.”

Eat shit, Nancy. You’re no less a traitor than the rest of the co-conspirators who placed Israel’s desire to create “Eretz Israel,” above the desires of the American people. You are in every sense of the word, a traitor.

Plunger, paranoid much?

You’re a nut, dude.

Read much?

TBogg is very wise. The best response to most of the Right’s bilge is a good horse laugh.

Anyone else think Steny is grinning from ear to ear over this? He is unusually silent about Pelosi’s blundering. Maybe the evil Hoyer is secretly plotting the overthrow of the queen.

I thought they were allies. No?

Until we get the corporate money out of Congress with a Campaign Finance Reform revolution, the public will ALWAYS be distracted by the Bright Shiny Object, because the media is a tool of the corporate Right. Hillary Clinton spoke of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” and she was correct: the corporate Right has bought control of this nation. We don’t hear the stories they want suppressed, and instead we are forced to respond to the stories — such as “torture is Pelosi’s fault” — that they propagate.

IMHO, Hoyer would throw Pelosi to the wolves in a second. Having said that, she has brought this on herself. I remember her taking impeachment off the table-and I swear I thought it was a campaign promise, fit to be broken as soon as a good reason appeared.
Of all the campaign promises to keep….

IMPEACH OBAMA FOR FAILING TO PROSECUTE WAR CRIMES.

I’m sure there would be bipartisan support.

End this friggin nightmare already.

What Daily Beast article?

I’m most curious about exactly what right Pelosi had to speak when she learned of the “EIT”. Who could she legally speak with, and if she had, what would the machine have done with her?

Getting the republicans out of power, it seems to me, was her focus. And she succeeded. And they’re pissed.

Exactly Tbogg! It’s really simple: NANCY IS TO BLAME FOR EVERYTHING THE BUSH REGIME DID FOR 8 YEARS.

We’re finding out today that our soldiers are still torturing prisoners down at GITMO despise President Obama’s banning of it. So what will the right wingers do? Will they stand in support of torture & Nancy or will they go on record as being against torture and then continue take the blame since they’re in the minority party as Nancy Pelosi was under Bush?

Quite the predicament the right wingers are in! I’m loving it!

Heck no…the Right Wing can applaud enhanced interrogation as carried out by our military and still slam Nancy Pelosi for being an unrepentant liar.

How much longer can Obama and Holder hold off on a special prosecutor? After the Draper article today, all hell’s going to break loose if SOMETHING doesn’t happen.

You don’t think she made her press conference the other day without thinking it through, do you? She wants these fuckers investigated.

There’s always that!

Amen.

And they will. This will prove to Americans that the republic party has completely lost it’s mind and are the barbarians we all thought they were! See? The right wing is still ridiculous in what they stand for and who they blame for what they support.

Rumsfeld’s is one of the few memoirs I might actually read. I’m curious as to how he’ll explain himself. The Draper article is really interesting. I’m just at the beginning.

It won’t dissapoint.

It’s important to remember that in the “The Lottery”, Tessie Hutchinson presumably went along with the entire ritual willingly for years before suddenly coming to the realization that “It’s not fair”. Hmm…

What a jerk. What did Rumsfeld think he was accomplishing?

Did you know that the Rumsfeld-Cheney Team B approach to governing goes back to the Ford administration? Flip to page 46 here and read all about it.

That picture is priceless!

Re: Splicer:

It’s important to remember that in the “The Lottery”, Tessie Hutchinson presumably went along with the entire ritual willingly for years before suddenly coming to the realization that “It’s not fair”. Hmm…

What is happening here is that there are too many parties covering for each other, or keeping each other inline with threats.
Do we know exactly what triggered the CIA to come out of the closet to blame Pelosi-and divert attention away from themselves?

They have been divided and we should capitalize that on to single them out from the herd. Fear will cause them to start pointing at each other singing like songbirds to save their own asses.

Politicians have been dividing the the public with their partisan bullshit for a centuries. Tear a page out of their machiavelli handbook and use it on them while a fissure has developed on the tumor that is them. We can’t give Pelosi a pass, but the attack has to include more targets, and by pressuring her she will lead the charge.
The charge doesn’t have to be the truth, it just has to be loud, and have some elements of truth in it to get them to start defending themselves and talking….

ding a ding ding ding!

really, Pelosi epitomizes Beltway rot, let her reap what she has sown.

Netroots pushback in defense of these Washington Palidins, who have nothing but scorn for the grassroots is kind of ridiculous. Pelosi was ok with everything Cheney was doing at the time, while many here were strenuously speaking out, and sending them reams of faxes and letters and calls, to zilch effect.

Its a sideshow – a way of avoiding having to pressure your Progressive President to appoint an independent commision to investigate, investigate! your favorite word! the torture era, and empower a special prosecutor to deal with the crimes uncovered, and to let the chips fall where they may.

The only positive outcome I can see in all this is letting it play out. Pelosi backed into a corner may drive her to push for an investigation but I think the major motivating factor if this continues if for her to take as many with her as possible.

Shorter village handicap: blue ribbon and/or congressional and/or truth hearing equals coverup and the end of the story.
Independent or DOJ commission equals jail for bushco and ruin for the villagers that enabled them.
Anybody taking bets on the outcome?