A “despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort”

Thus spake former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on current Speaker Pelosi’s recent statements. He and the Republican cohort (it’s not a party any more) are steamed about Pelosi’s inconsistent statements of when she learned about waterboarding and her assertions that she was lied to (“misled,” she later called it) by the CIA briefers. Newt calls that duplicity and, of course, the cohort has been quick to rise to the occasion. 

So a big Washington row is brewing between Mme Pelosi and those defenders of truth, justice and the Republican way. Cheney has come in as public defender of his administration’s achievement in “keeping the country safe,” though no one can say whether their efforts produced that result. The use of enhanced interrogation techniques saved perhaps “hundreds of thousands of lives,” he maintains. Which, you know, begs the question of whether torture should have been used at all. So you have the pragmatists versus the moralists. 

Most but not all Dems are lining up behind Pelosi, and the White House wishes this would all go away. CIA chief Leon Panetta is in the middle, but Friday came down hard on the Speaker’s charges.

Frank Rich thinks all the photos of prisoner abuse will emerge or be leaked, despite Mr. Obama’s latter-day decision not to release them, something Rich found a futile gesture. But Obama was absolutely correct in reversing course—commentators like Katrina vanden Heuvel (right) to the contrary notwithstanding. Her Sunday babblings on George Stephanopolous’ This Week are becoming so shrill and partisan that some left-wingers like myself can’t hear them anymore without retching. Honestly, much of what Liz Cheney said made more sense. 

I think the old-line party positions are clearly dissolving under pressure of potent new realities—political, military, and economic. So the stance of people like Pelosi, attacking the Bush torture policy without reference to the fact that she and many of her cohorts failed to protest them at the time, is full of hypocrisy and, maybe, misprision. The LA Times spoke out on this today.

The fact that she herself incited this row with her ill-prepared, nervous, stuttering press conference shows that she will neither follow the White House lead nor face the need for transparency that she and her supporters so often proclaim. 

I think her days as Speaker are numbered, and that’s a good thing. Mr. Obama and the country want to move beyond this sort of rank partisanship. Let’s have a truth commission in which Ms. Pelosi can testify as to her own clean hands. She and too many Democrats let the Iraq venture proceed without a peep. They became accessories to a wretched policy for which they now demand accountability. 

Where were you guys when the rest of us were marching against the coming war?