Hey Nancy, don't unpack

Robert Novak dissects San Fran Nan's first big blunder:

WASHINGTON -- As the new House majority caucus prepared to pick its leadership today, Democrats were trying to make the best of the inevitability of ancy Pelosi as the party's first speaker in a dozen years. They have put out the word that she was not serious in endorsing Rep. John Murtha for majority leader. How much effort she has exerted for her longtime ally is irrelevant, but she has actively solicited votes this week.

The damage to her was irrevocable when she wrote her colleagues last weekend urging them to pick Murtha over Rep. Steny Hoyer. Close associates of Hoyer say her letter stunned him, and he was not alone. While Pelosi had made clear she would vote for Murtha, the public endorsement was unexpected.

[snip]

This is a no-win situation for Pelosi. If Murtha wins today, she will be accused of personal vindictiveness in derailing Hoyer, who is more popular in the caucus and better qualified for leadership. If Murtha loses, as is much more probable, she will be seen as bumbling her first attempt to lead the new Democratic majority. Pelosi could have avoided this dilemma by standing aside as Speaker-presumptive Newt Gingrich did when he voted for his ally Robert Walker as majority whip but did not ask members to oppose Tom DeLay.

Pelosi's mistake confirms longstanding, privately held Democratic apprehension about her abilities. Their concerns do not reflect the Republican indictment of her as a reflexive San Francisco liberal. Some of her most trenchant congressional critics are on the left wing of the party. These colleagues worry that her decision-making may be distorted by personal considerations.

[snip]

But Pelosi's personal pique was evident in opposing her rival diva from California, Rep. Jane Harman, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. In line to replace Harman was Rep. Alcee Hastings, who had been impeached as a federal judge on bribery charges.

For a party that effectively stressed a Republican climate of corruption in the recent campaign to consider placing Murtha and Hastings in its leadership astonishes a wide range of Democrats. They do not believe Murtha can defeat Hoyer, but the imminence of Hastings stuns them. Well-placed Democrats have told Pelosi she cannot permit this to happen. What they hesitate to contemplate is what lies ahead based on Pelosi's performance before she has taken the oath.

When Nancy Pelosi ruthlessly squashed any talk of impeaching President Bush as almost her first act as Speaker presumptive I took that as a sign that she was an highly intelligent woman and would prove herself to be a deadly dangerous opponent for the next two years.

You see my hope was that the Democrats would find the temptation to impeach Mr. Bush to be too powerful to resist. I was hoping that the nation would be shown the spectacle of the dailykos wing of the Democrat Party running wild in fully televised congressional hearings.

I wanted the moonbat wing of the Jackass Party to egg their left wing congressmen on to lay out everything from "Bush lied, people died", to "the WTC blast was a controlled demolition", to "every Jew who worked in the WTC got a phone call the night before warning them to stay home the next day". And do all of this in the courtroom-type setting of impeachment hearings where the President's Republican defenders (in other words "Sane People") could pick them apart.

This would do two things. One it would show the public exactly what the party of FDR and JFK has become. The public would be so turned off at the Democrat's carnival of insanity that come 2008 a conservative president and congress could ride into power on a 50 state landslide.

The other thing that impeachment would do is to shatter the alliance which I sense forming between the congressional left and the President. Bush has a number of things which he wants to get done which a Republican congress would have never gone along with. Things like amnesty for illegal Mexicans. If he works with the new Democrat majority he just might be able to ram this down the public's throat.

But George W Bush is known for having a thin skin and for holding grudges and if he has to spend the next year defending himself against Democrat attempts to remove him from office in disgrace that just might be enough to cause him to get his back up and pull out his veto pen.

Which brings me back to why I thought Pelosi would be a formidable opponent. I thought she saw the same thing I did and moved to remove the threat before it get any legs in the new congress. However her current actions cause me to drastically lower my view of her.

She rides a wave of voter discontent which has at least as much to do with the public's perception of Republican corruption as it does with opposition to the war into power and promises to have the "most ethical congress in the nation's history" and then reaches into her party's ranks for the most visibly corrupt people she can find to fill key leadership positions.

Rudy Giuliani needs to take the White House tour and bring along a tape measure so he can get a head start on shopping for drapes.