San Fran Nan plays it smart

From The Washington Post:

House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has decided against naming either Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee, or Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (Fla.), the panel's No. 2 Democrat, to chair the pivotal committee next year.

The decisions came despite lobbying by conservative Democrats on Harman's behalf and a full-throttled campaign by Hastings to overcome the stigma of the 1988 impeachment that drove him from his federal judgeship.

In this as in squashing the move to impeach President Bush Pelosi is showing an admirable tendency toward discretion. This seems to indicate that she possesses a trait very much lacking in her fellow members of the lunatic fringe of the Democrat Party's extreme left wing - the intelligence to realize and the honesty to admit that her views are representative of only a small percentage of the American people.

If you go over to the DU or the dailykos the people there seem absolutely convinced that the average American is just as much a barking moonbat as they are. This is somewhat understandable since most of the posters to left wing fever swamps like that are college student punks who don't associate off campus very much and therefore don't often encounter real human beings.

Pelosi seems to be cut from different cloth. Knowing that any attempt to implement her far left nutjob ideas during the next two years will frighten and disgust the public so badly that they will hand the White House and legislature back to Republicans for at least another decade in 2008 she seems to be committed to a long game.

Of course I do not believe for one second that she has changed. I do not believe for one second that she has abandoned her desire to turn America into a socialist gulag patterned after Castro's Cuba (except without the part where they throw homosexuals into concentration camps). She is just smart enough to realize that if the Democrats play it moderate for the next two years that helps Hillary gain the Oval Office in '08 and then they can declare a state of emergency and suspend the next election indefinitely.