In an “extended, exclusive” interview tomorrow [Obama] will sit down with Special Report anchor Bret Baier to make his health care reform pitch to the FNC audience. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

The interview will air in full at 6pmET tomorrow and will take place earlier in the afternoon. “We welcome the opportunity to sit down with the President and try to get some specifics on the health care legislation,” said Baier in making the announcement right after NoonET today on Fox News.

The history between the White House and Fox News has been a shaky one. In September he went to every major news outlet except Fox for an interview. That started things, and with FNC essentially winning the war it came to a head in late October with a meeting between Robert Gibbs and Michael Clemente.

So Fox is a just a bunch of right-wing extremists watched by right-wing extremist teabaggers… until Obama is on the ropes.

What. A. Tool.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Point One: James Bunning is a 7-time All-Star, Hall of Fame pitcher who retired with a 3.27 ERA (albeit in the National League). He kicks ass.

Point Two: He’s not handled his interactions with the press very well. Perfect example is his confrontation with ABC’s Jonathan Karl we’ve all seen a million times by now. Okay, Karl was asking a very stupid question that Bunning had answered a million times already (see more below) and was just goading him for dramatic effect. But Bunning, someone who’s been in Washington since 1987, should be better at such things.

Okay, now on with the post:

THANK GOD FOR JIM BUNNING

Here’s a guy who long ago, in a public split with his party’s leaders announced he’s not going to seek re-election this fall. So what’s he doing?

Well, the Senate this week was about to extend unemployment benefits at a cost of about $10,000,000,000. Chump change these days, unfortunately. In fact, about a percent and a half of the “stimulus” pork bill’s tab. Say! How about we use some of those unused funds to pay for this sop program? That’s kinda what he had in mind.

Out of 100 Senators, he’s the only one who is insisting the body live up to the PAYGO provision that was signed by the president last month. Back then, the Kommunity Organizer had this to say about it:

It says to Congress, you have to pay as you go. You can’t spend a dollar unless you cut a dollar elsewhere. This is how a responsible family or business manages a budget. And this is how a responsible government manages a budget, as well.

This, of course, is exactly what Bunning was insisting. Despite the vile and childish accusations leveled against him by a parade of Democrats who should know better (and frankly, should have a little more shame than they’re displaying), Bunning is in favor of extending these benefits. He was just insisting that the Senate pay for them. Crazy idea, I know.

In a body where just last week a $15,000,000,000 “jobs” pork-laden useless bill was passed because, heck, it’s not that much money anymore without any plan to pay for it, we need a few more Jim Bunnings. Instead, he was vilified by the Democrats in the most dispicable way, calling him names and demonizing him.

Ironically, Bunning had suggested several times ways to pay for this extension, and in fact, Senate Majority Leader Reid could have at any time called for cloture to move the legislation forward but instead chose not to simply to take shots at (again, I say) the only man in the Senate insisting this be paid for.

What Democrats won’t do to demonize Republicans. Like a badger cornered, they’re doing all they can to demonize the other side regardless of the facts. Shame on them. And shame also on his fellow Republicans for allowing him to be torn up by the dogs of the media and the Democratic party.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

Glenn Reynolds often asks is there anything bacon can’t do?  Maybe he should also ask is there anything FoxNews (or Sarah Palin or George W. Bush) can’t be blamed for.  On Thursday and today, he linked two posts either correcting or failing to correct Robert Reich’s post* faulting FoxNews for helping gin up that “huge anti-incumbent wave” in 1994, you know, against the then-Democratic congressional majority.

Problem is, as Frank Ross points out, “Prof. Reich overlooked one minor detail: FoxNews Channel’s first broadcast wasn’t until October 7, 1996.”

The Huffington Post which also ran the column, as Alpaca reports, has yet “to issue a correction/retraction to the story.“

Guess the editors there still can’t fathom how Republicans won back Congress without FoxNews.  I mean, you know, how else could the American people have been turned against health care reform which everyone supports because it’s the right thing because liberals back it and they always want the very best for everyone (Except Sarah Palin.  And George W. Bush.   And Dick Cheney)?

But, here’s the kicker:  Reich was Secretary of Labor during the entirety of Clinton’s first term.  He’s not some upstart leftie blogger who didn’t to to college until this century and didn’t know when Fox was founded.   Reich was in the public eye in 1994; he had to be aware that there was no FoxNews until the month Clinton was re-elected.  Is this then, some kind of ex post facto memory when you apply your current prejudices to the past?

*cross-posted on each of those sites.

My first reaction to O’Keefe’s arrest was “oh how stupid of him.” Upon further reflection, I have changed my mind. I think O’Keefe is a patriot and was probably onto something that We, The People should know about involving Sen. Landrieu.

Since the media no longer investigates corruption among the liberal elite, the burden falls to brave souls like O’Keefe.

The American Left praises and honors such real criminals and murderers as Castro, Che, Mao and Mumia Abu Jamal. Surely I’m not going to throw O’Keefe under the bus until I know all of the facts. And if he was in the pursuit of truth, then I think his actions were justified.

James O’Keefe is no less a patriot than Ted Kennedy is a murderer. After all, the Democrats in Washington continually ignore our nations’ laws and the US Constitution. Perhaps it is time for We, The People to join the fight on their terms.

These are indeed times that try men’s souls and our time sometimes requires extraordinary measures to expose lies and stand up for Liberty.

UPDATE (from Dan): Bruce, this appears to be an area where we disagree, though appreciate this defense from a commenter at Althouse. Right now, I’m with Malkin, “Know your limits. Know the law. Don’t get carried away. And don’t become what you are targeting.” That said, I’ll wait until the facts are in before rendering a final judgment.

Seems the Democrats can’t get enough of kicking around another Republican, their all-purpose bogeyman, George W. Bush, on whom they blame all manner of ills, including the groundswell of support in Massachusetts for a Republican sounding quite different from W, promising to rein in government spending. Still, Democrats contend “the fault for Coakley’s now-floundering MA SEN bid lies with one person — George W. Bush.“

To be sure, the son of a man who held Daniel Webster’s seat in the United States Senate did fault his party–for not being harsh enough on W:

One thing the Democrats have done wrong? We haven’t kept the focus on this disaster on the Republicans who brought it upon us. We’ve tried too hard to do that right thing, and that’s to fix it, as opposed to spend more of our time and energy pointing the finger at who got us [here] in the first place.

Yeah, Americans really like it when you’re always pointing the finger at someone else.  Guess he didn’t realize that it was a member of his own party who wanted “to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“

Democrats will always have W:

Yeah, to his credit, after taking office, the President did meet with House Republicans, but the Democrat also retorted, “I won,” when Republicans raised concerns about the cost of the “stimulus.”  Democratic intransigence notwithstanding, Frum buys into the Democratic narrative and blames Republicans for Democrats’ unwillingness to compromise.  He even blames the Administration’s decision to impose carbon controls by administrative fiat on the GOP’s efforts to block cap and trade.  (He fails to mention Democrats from coal-producing states who have raised concern about the regulatory scheme.)

What other conservatives liken to Mafia tactics, Frum ascribes to GOP rejectionism:

The furious rejectionist frenzy of the past 12 months is exacting a terrible price upon Republicans. We’re getting worse and less conservative results out of Washington than we could have negotiated, if we had negotiated.

If we had negotiated?  We? Huh?  Does anybody seriously believe the Democrats wanted to negotiate?  Let’s see, they crafted the “stimulus” package without seeking input from the GOP, then moved heaven and earth to get a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate.  Just last week, “no Republican lawmakers were on the list of attendees” at the President’s job summit.

Hardly evidence of an Administration eager to compromise.

Instead of offering even one hint of concern about Democratic intransigence in his blog post today, Frum blames those pesky Republicans who don’t live in Washington, D.C.: “But, it’s the rank-and-file who are the problem here!“

Seems like Frum wants the GOP to adopt the tactics of Republican congressional leaders in Bush’s second term who showed little concern for the rank and file’s concern about government spending.  Maybe there’s a reason Frum stopped calling his blog New Majority.

RELATED:   Even Maine’s Olympia Snowe, the only Republican Senator to vote for any version of Obamacare, is highly critical of her Democratic colleagues:

Far from “systematically working through the concerns, the issues and the alternatives,” Mrs. Snowe added, Democrats have instead favored “artificially generated haste” and settled on a strategy “to ram it, to jam it” through Congress. The Senator detailed her good-faith participation in the “group of six” on the Senate Finance Committee, which met some 31 times over the spring and summer and reflected “the kind of extensive, meticulous process that an issue of this magnitude requires.”

Read the whole thing!

Over at the Atlantic, Chris Good reports:  ”only half of Americans would rather have President Obama in the White House than his predecessor, while 44 percent would prefer George W. Bush to still be president.“

He cites a Public Policy Polling survey which found:

Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama’s declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country’s difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

If Obama keeps reminding us of the “tough situation he inherited” (as he did again Tuesday), Americans might not think him up to the job.  You know, when a new CEO is hired to take over a company with declining revenues, he doesn’t blame the old management, but rolls up his sleeves and figures out how to fix the mess.  If he keeps blaming the old management while revenues continue to decline, the board will likely replace him at their next meeting.

Looks like the “board” of this organization is beginning to think more favorably about the old CEO, even though he has gone into a constitutionally mandated (and not entirely unwelcome) retirement.  And the Constitution prevents the board from meeting for another three years.  Looks like we’re stuck with the whiny CEO.

And his hapless predecessor begins to look better by contrast.

It’s like hiring a guy to do magic incantations to cure your recurrent headaches, then when his supposedly healing words don’t work and the headaches return with even greater force, tossing the Tylenol and renewing his contract.

Now, with the Democrats having been in charge for ten full months (and then some), after having promised us that should Congress pass that aforementioned “stimulus,” unemployment would peak at 8%, Mrs. Pelosi, wait for it, blames her party’s all-purpose bad a guy, a Mr. George W. Bush:

Though jobs numbers released this morning were better than expected, Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want anyone to forget that the economic crisis started under the Bush administration.

The Department of Labor estimated today that just 11,000 jobs were lost in November. . . . Pelosi took the opportunity to take a few shots at the last administration.

(H/t Gateway Pundit.)  Hey, Nancy, you know when that recession began, you’d been Speaker for nearly a full year.

Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress.  Wonder then how your party’s victories impacted the economy.  And what you and your fellow partisans were doing to forestall an economic decline.

And wheareas instead of demonstrating “bottomless reservoirs of gracelessness” in faulting those predecessors for “the terrible mess he inherited” as Obama has done toward his immediate predecessor, Churchill, according to Paul Johnson, showed magnanimity toward those flawed leaders:

Churchill wasted an extraordinarily small amount of his time and emotional energy on the meanness of life:  recrimination, shifting the blame onto others, malice, revenge seeking, dirty tricks, spreading rumors, harboring grudges, waging vendettas.  Having fought hard, he washed his hands and went on to the next contest.  It is one reason for his success.  There is nothing more draining and exhausting than hatred.  And malice is bad for the judgment.  Churchill loved to forgive and make up.  His treatment of Baldwin and Chamberlain* after he became prime minister is an object lesson in sublime magnanimity.  Nothing gave him more pleasure than to replace enmity with friendship, not least with the Germans.

An object lesson Obama is in sore need of learning.  In his speech on Afghanistan, by one pundit’s count, he “adverted at least half a dozen times to the supposed blunders of his predecessor.”  And he’s not the only official in his Administration who eschews such Churchillian magnanimity in order to lambaste George W. Bush.  In an email to supporters touting Obama’s Afghanistan speech, Vice President Biden “said of the new policy towards Afghanistan: ‘It’s a clean break from the failed Afghanistan policy of the Bush administration, and a new, focused strategy that can succeed.’“

Why must they always define their policies by contrasting them to the “failed” ones of W instead defending them on their own merits?

Wonder how we could make a teaching moment for these two?

*those aforementioned predeceesors

A U.S. Census worker found dead in a secluded Clay County cemetery killed himself but tried to make the death look like a homicide, authorities have concluded.

Bill Sparkman, 51, of London, might have tried to cover the manner of his death to preserve payments under life-insurance polices that he had taken out. The policies wouldn’t pay off if Sparkman committed suicide, state police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said.

“We believe it was an intentional act on his part to take his own life,” said Rudzinski, who helped lead the investigation.

Bill Sparkman, the census worker found hanged Sept. 12 in a remote patch of Daniel Boone National Forest in Clay County. An autopsy report is pending. Photo courtesy of Corbin Times-Tribune. AP – FILE – In this undated 2008 photo, Bill Sparkman speaks to a 7th grade class during a lesson about sound waves. Authorities have released Sparkman’s body to his family nearly a month after he was found dead with a rope around his neck in rural eastern Kentucky. (AP Photo/The Times-Tribune, File)

Sparkman’s nude body was found Sept. 12 by people visiting the cemetery. There was a rope around his neck tied to a tree, and he had what appeared to be the word “fed” written on his chest in black marker.

You might remember the psychotic Andrew Sullivan’s screech when the death was first reported:

But the most worrying possibility – that this is Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts – remains real. We’ll see.

Will Andrew admit he was wrong and maligned 40% of the USA who self-identifies as conservatives?

Don’t count on it any more than Algore admitting his culpability in the largest world wide hoax and conspiracy ever committed.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

But Barack and Nancy (and Harry) don’t seem to know much about floor cleaning. They seem better at exacerbating messes than cleaning them up. When the president took power in January, his very first act was not to grab an effective cleaning solution. Instead, he pulled an old one off the shelves that the Democrats had been wanting to use for years, even though it has always proven ineffective against the type of mess that we were in (the mess having been caused by it in the first place). In too much of a rush to read the label on the bottle (generously assuming that the label was accurate), they dumped the whole thing into the bucket without diluting it. Then, in their rush to use it, they tripped over the bucket and spilled it all over.

(H/t Instapundit)

But, then again, Robin Givhan thinks our casual attire causes us to lose respect while one Congressman has called those protesting the President’s policies “brown shirts.” At least, this guy, unlike his colleagues, apologized.  And Speaker Pelosi calls us astroturfers bearing swastikas while Harry Reid thinks we’re “evil-mongers.”  (No wonder he trails a number of potential opponents in the Silver State.)

Gosh, guess this people didn’t get the Democratic Chief Executive’s message about the new era of postpartisan politics.

Let me remind you again: They can pass any bill they want any time they want. Conservatives can scream their heads off at these things and there’s not an ounce of good it’ll do if Democrats are united. This whole partisan “war” Obama and Axelrod have concocted is kabuki theater against an enemy they’ve already (momentarily) defeated; it’s the Blue Dogs’ fear that they’ll be thrown out of office if they vote for this travesty that’s put the left in the predicament they’re in.

Emphasis added.

While the Democrats may rant and rave about those repugnant Republicans, the real issue is that they can’t hold their own party together.

And despite controlling all the levers of power, Democrats (and their allies on left-wing blogs), as Amity Shlaes noted back in May, seem angrier than ever.  Basically, the issue is more psychological than political, they need a target upon which to spew their venom.  And since they’ve long hated Republicans, why take down the target now that the GOP is out of power?

I mean, think about this for a second, they’ve elected a charismatic guy President who manages to get his mug on TV more often than most of his predecessors.  Much of the media leans left and gives their viewpoint favorable coverage.   With congressional majorities, they have more elected officials with more ready access to local media than do Republicans.  And they have Health Care for American Now (HCAN), an outfit with a $40 million budget to promote the Democrats’ proposed health care overhaul.

And yet, despite all these resources as their disposal, Americans disapprove of the President’s performance on health care. It’s not just one poll.  Via Glenn, we learn, “Polls from National Public Radio, Wall Street Journal/NBC News, The Washington Post, Gallup, and Pew all show that the American people do not support President Barack Obama’s health care plan.“

What went wrong? With a party led by a man adept at organizing, they can’t control public opinion, so they demonize adversaries and labeling concerned citizens as tools of corporate interests:

So now we have the spectacle of the White House trying to demonize the health insurers which it was not so long ago romancing and trying to label as “mobs” and “astroturf” voters who show up at town meetings and voice opposition to Democratic health care proposals—this from a president who during his campaign urged his supporters to respond to those opposing him by “get[ting] in their faces.” These seem like desperation tactics to me.

In desperation, they lash out at their opponents.   But, I thought Obama had said he was trying to “break” that “pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“

Now, he and his allies are blaming Republicans (and an industry typically allied with the GOP) for his inability to move public opinion in the direction he wants it to go and for his failure to unite his party behind his statist initiatives.

*And “right-wing” interest groups.   And health insurerers.

Hi Ms. Douglas & Secretary Napolitano (since you are reading these, too):

I figured I would save you the trouble and send you an email right now so you can put me on your “Healthcare Enemies List” right away.  No fuss, no muss, no fishy-ness.

You see, I have read the legislation… I do know what HR 3200 says… I’m not being paid to protest, as a matter of fact my industry is supporting healthcare reform!   But I will continue to stand up against the Gestapo-like tactics of President Obama against those to oppose him for legitimate policy issues.

How dare you ask for my neighbors or my readers to inform on me.  This is an outrage better suited in the former Soviet Union, Syria or Iran.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

-Bruce Carroll (aka – GayPatriot)
Charlotte, North Carolina
www.gaypatriot.org

The better to smear Republicans.

Sense of Obama’s reading of history as excluding American accomplishments . . . whole notion of reset button based on simplistic assumption that Bush’s entire policy was bad, [so he seeks] to define himself not so much as advancing American interests but [instead] as opposing his predecessor’s policies.

He has adopted that same rationale, at least rhetorically, on the economy as well, even though his domestic policy amounts to little more than an expansion of Bush’s, increased government spending.

And yet, even as Obama’s economic policy resembles that of his predecessor (albeit on steroids), he and his party’s minions are painting a picture of the “past eight years” (their favorite mantra) as a dark age akin to the Great Depression.  Note how Democratic spokespeople, in asking us to be patient about a recovery (which given the president’s promises in pushing the “stimulus” should already be underway) are telling us it took “eight years to get into this mess.”

It seems they’re banking on our short memories and the biased media coverage of the economy during the Bush years before the downturn.   That downturn only began in December 2007, nearly a full year after a Democratic Congress (which increased federal spending at a faster clip than did the prior spendthrift Republican Congress) came to power.

In short, given that the President and his team are better on offense than they are on defense, they seem intent on running against the “last eight years” just as Democrats spent nearly two generations running against Herbert Hoover.  Problem is that Hoover’s downturn began only a few months after he took office and while he served with a Republican Congress and that he responded with policies similar to those Obama (and the Democrats) are proposing today.  Those interventionist policies only prolonged the downturn.

The MSM, even biased against Bush, may let the Democrats get away with it, but if a poll which oversamples Democrats shows the President’ts numbers tumbling, it’s a sign Americans are judging the Administraiton by its record not the alleged excesses of the “last eight years.”

Sunday morning, while fixing my coffee and determined to continue a weekend largely away from politics, I made the silly mistake of turning on the news.  Some former DNC official was telling us that it took “eight years to get into this [economic] mess” and it’s going to take some time to get out of it.  For a moment, I wished I had been the Republican designated to challenge her.  I would have replied by asking her to specify just what policies in the past eight years (i.e., the Bush Administration) led to this downturn and to remind her that the downturn began in December 2007, nearly one full year after a Democratic Congress came to power.

If the unmentioned Republican President deserves blame for the downturn so too does that Democratic Congress.

And as this Democratic President’s poll numbers tumble, his Administration and congressional Democrats are considering investigating that Republican Administration’s policies and officials.

There is some method to the Administration’s madness.  Obama and his political team have always been better on offense than defense.

The longer he serves as President, however, the less people will accept his excuse that he “inherited” this problem from his predecessor.  He’s smart to try to push a lot of legislation — as well as the Sotomayor confirmation hearings — during the summer when people are less focused on the news than they are during the rest of the year.

But, as the summer wanes and people focus more on the news after Labor Day, they’ll see the same man who had been in office when, sometime prior to Memorial Day, they pretty much  tuned politics out to focus on family, relaxation and recreation. Obama will no longer be the new guy brought in to clean up the old guy’s mess. People won’t cut him as much slack as they might have in his first two seasons in office.

*tweaked title in the morning (PST) because the title I had picked in the wee hours of the morning (before bed) when I initially posted this ssemed quite clunky.

Given how much attention this story has gotten, with even liberal friends of mine saying that her explanations don’t pass the “bulls***” test, you’d think House Democrats would welcome a probe as it would exonerate their Speaker.  (That is, if they believe she’s telling the truth.)  Democrats may not want to remember this, but former President Bush did not block proposals to investigate their claims that he lied us into the Iraq War.  And the Silbermann-Robb invesigation along with the Senate Intelligence Committee probe dismissed those claims (as did Lord Butler’s Report in Britain).

My guess those is Democats don’t want to similarly investigate Mrs. Pelosi because they don’t believe her and don’t want to revisit the embarrassment of her performance last week when, a few months hence, the panel reaches its conclusion that Mrs. Pelosi slandered the CIA.

So, instead of addressing the issue of her boss’s deception, her spokesman Nadeam Elsham does what Democratic staffers do best: blame Republicans.  She claimed that the GOP was engaged in “partisan politics and an attempt . . . to distract from the real issue of creating jobs and making progress on health care, energy and education.” Well, Miss Pot, that kettle sure does look black.  What do you think Mrs. Pelosi was doing in bringing up this issue in the first place?  And what has you been doing when her credbility has been called into question?  And what are you doing now?  Blaming Republicans.   And that’s partisan politics, pure and simple.

It seems House Democrats are trying to distract from the issue of dishonesty among their leaders and growing corruption within their ranks.  And this under the helm of the Speaker who promised us “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.“

UPDATE:  Factcheck offers a “detailed time line of Pelosi’s shifting accounts“  (Via Instapundit).

I began to reconsider my own past criticism of his post-Bush Administration outspokenness.  It seems he was only defending himself (and that Administration) against unwarranted criticism for his successors and the MSM.  While it may be unprecedented for an immediate past Vice President to criticize the incoming Administration, it is also unprecedented for a new President and his team to lay so much blame on his predecessor and his team.

So, when I heard expression, “punching bag,”on the radio, it reminded me yet again how members of the current Administration and their media and weblog cronies blamed their predecessors, particularly Cheney, for the current “mess.”  And I wondered (and not for the first time) how the former Vice President bore with such equanimity the vitriol hurled regularly against him for the better part of the past eight years.

So impervious Cheney seem to political pain that Jim Geraghty contends Cheney isn’t impeded by the fear of bad press; he once “responded to a comment about his policy positions being unpopular with ‘So?’“  Harsh attacks just roll right off him.  They’re like bullets to Wolverine.  They may hit, but they never hurt.

And then a memory came to mind of the one time I was in the same room as Cheney–only for the better part of the evening, I didn’t know it.  Back in 1990, when I worked in Washington, D.C., a friend who worked for then-Vice President called me at my office one day, asking if I could join him later that week for a dinner at the Shoreham where the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (I believe it was ISI) was honoring the then-Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney.

A fan of Mrs. Cheney, I agreed.  Sitting way in the back, we didn’t have a clear view of the head table.  As that good woman was speaking, someone nudged me and pointed out the Secretary of Defense, Mrs. Cheney’s husband, the future Vice President, sitting at that table, looking lovingly at his wife.  (We had to stand up and crane our necks to see.)  It struck me how he, then a member of the President’s cabinet, remained silent for that entire evening.  It seemed he knew the evening was about her and didn’t want to call any attention to himself as that might deflect attention from his wife.

And perhaps, because I was driving to the Reagan Library as this memory came to mind, I wondered if Lynne Cheney served the same function for the immediate past Vice President as the former Nancy Davis served for the Gipper.  Knowing he could count on her love and support, he was more confident in his convictions and better able to withstand the mean-spirited attacks directed against him.

No one seems to believe Nancy Pelosi.

Having promised “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history,” Mrs. Pelosi now becomes emblematic of an institutions in which the Democratic culture of corruption (to borrow an expression of which she was once so fond) rivals (and perhaps exceeds) that of the last Republican Congress.

You know a Democrat’s in trouble when the editorialist of the Washington Post question her credibility:  ”Ms. Pelosi’s shifting accounts and faltering performance at her news conference were far from reassuring.”  

As she begins to lose the trust of a number in the MSM who would normally be sympathetic to her, she does what most Democrats do when the spotlight is turned on them:  blame Bush.  ”Pelosi issued a statement late Friday shifting her criticism to the Bush administration – hours after CIA Director Leon Panetta defended his agency against Pelosi’s charges.“

Part of that criticism was to accuse Bush and his team of lying us into war in Iraq.  Never mind that those who leveled the charge could not point to a single statement that then-President made that he knew was wrong at the time he made it.  Now, we have an example of a claim Pelosi made with ample evidence indicating that she knew it was false at the time she made.

(In her defense, maybe she had forgotten what she learned during those CIA briefings in 2002-03.  But, instead of faulting her memory, she has accused the CIA of misleading Congress.)

It will be interesting to see if the same left-wing bloggers who repeated the mantra that Bush lied (without providing any actual evidence that he did) will similarly criticize the Democratic Speaker for her dishonesty (with substantial evidence that she lied).

Instapundit Reader Doug Welsh finds a similarity between “Nancy Pelosi’s current circumstances [and] Democrats’ accusations that Bush lied us into the Iraq war“:

They saw the same intelligence that Bush (and Clinton before him) saw, indicating that Saddam had WMD. Few if any questioned the validity of the information. Most voted for the war. But when the war became unpopular they turned and claimed they had been misled by Bush. This was all a lie and political posturing, but it was effective then.

Pelosi’s penchant for political posturing, her eagerness to go after the Bush Administration even after W left town, has now cost her credibility.  It may even cost her her job — and even threaten her party’s majority.