Just a tap dance: Nancy Pelosi's press conference just a badly executed diversion

If your baloney meter was registering off the charts yesterday, you probably heard Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's claim that the CIA did not tell her about waterboarding.

The halting, read-off-a-press-release speech was less than reassuring at best -- and really seemed to be nothing more than a scramble to keep the controversial congresswoman off the hot seat.

Pelosi's claim is being made to allow her continued efforts to prosecute those in the Bush administration and in the intelligence community who pursued this enhanced interrogation technique.

To do that, she has to make sure that she cuts ties to the knowledge herself -- hence her extraordinary claim that she was lied to about what was going on.

Pelosi is doing what politicians do when someone challenges an irresponsible or foolish comment they make. She is trying to work the crowd and to divert attention from what is the real question about terrorism questioning techniques -- did they work and keep America safe?

Her tap dance will continue now that more than a few people are wondering how the speaker of the House could be so naive and uninformed -- or why she has chosen to lie about what she knew.

No matter how you slice it, yesterday's performance was really nothing more than another partisan attack gone wrong.

By the time the whole question has been put to rest, we are going to need a lot of mustard.

Published in Editorials on May 15, 2009 10:49 AM