Nancy Pelosi Restores the Natural Order of Things:
Thank Nancy Pelosi for at least one thing: she's making it okay to hate the CIA again. Oh, sure, we were all giddy when, trying to demonstrate that they hadn't been neutered completely by Dick Cheney squeezing their balls to get info, the agency leaked classified info that it had put contrary footnotes in documents about evidence of WMDs in Iraq. And, man, we liberals were all about how splendiferous our magnificent intelligence agents were when Karl Rove outed Valerie Plame. It's so very sweet when you and some guy you hate are standing in a room with a starved tiger and the tiger eats the other guy. But you're still in that room, man, and that tiger is gonna get hungry again. However insidious and vindictive and destructive and, you know, criminal Karl Rove (among others) was about Plame, however deliberately manipulated or unconscionably dumb the CIA was about weapons in Iraq, it was odd, to say the least, to see the left praising and defending the very government entity that had been the cause of so, so many of the very clusterfucks that have plagued this country.

You want a list? Let's take the beginner's tour. For shit and giggles, start with the Vietnam War, work your way through Central and South America, pause to wave at the Contras and the graves of Pinochet's disappeared, take a walk through the School of the Americas, jaunt over to Afghanistan to meet the Mujihadeen, check out the failure to predict the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, shake hands with Saddam Hussein, and then look over the many, many documents that did say there were WMDs in Iraq. And that's just the start, before we even get to the current "enhanced interrogation" scandal.

So when Speaker of the House Pelosi, finally sick of all the bullshit swirling around about when she was or wasn't briefed about waterboarding, said that the CIA lied to her in 2002 and that "They mislead us all the time," well, it was one of the ballsiest things we've heard from a top Democrat in Congress for a long damn time. Pelosi upset the motherfuckin' apple cart by breaching the ass-kissing we're supposed to be giving anyone who is remotely connected with fighting terrorism (at least since the 2004 report on pre-war intelligence failures).

Oh, the Republicans went nutzoid, leading House Minority Leader John Boehner to make the idiotic statement that he couldn't imagine "anyone in our intelligence area would ever mislead a member of Congress." This was followed by Senator Kit Bond, a man who lets other men call him "Kit," fanning himself and saying, in essence, "Oh, my stars and garters, I believe this has given me the vapors."

And while some Democrats and some in the press wonder what the fuck Pelosi is thinking, getting into a fight with the CIA never being a good idea, the Rude Pundit's said it before and he'll say it again: you don't fuck with Nancy Pelosi. You might disagree with her (and there's a great deal to do so on), but she's mostly a straight-shooter, and when she's cornered, she is like a fuckin' rat on meth: she'll chew right through you to get out. And one of the things she's done here is to put the universe right again: the CIA ought to be feared, for its ability to fuck up the world, for its pettiness, and for its inbred sense of privilege, that it's somehow above oversight. C'mon - the only records of these briefings to members of Congress are from the CIA. As Bob Graham has already demonstrated, the CIA ain't exactly on its game with the record-keeping.

Somewhere in here, the Rude Pundit wouldn't be surprised if this is a bizarro Republican plot, fostered by Dick Cheney's moles and Porter Goss, to sow the seeds of fear of Democratic leadership, a way to not only (obviously) distract from who is actually to blame on torture authorization and, well, torture itself, but as a way for the Republicans to reclaim power by making doubts about Democratic honesty and competence a focus. Toss in the Jane Harman story as another chapter.

Wait - the CIA engaged in subterfuge? Why, that's unthinkable.