Disingenuous Left’s Confusion Over Pelosi’s Lies and the Right’s Reaction

There is one particular lefty whose blog I frequent. I do so for several reasons. First of all, he is not psychotic, second he has a great sense of humor, and third I think he really means well for the country. Of course, he's still wrong, naturally. There is also a fourth reason. I watch his blog because I get the lefty spin du jour without having to sift through the stupidity of the DailyKos, the childish profaneness of wonkette, the circus acts of Olbermann and Maddow, or the down right mental disease that infests the Demmocraticundergound. Plus my friend Piker saves me a lot of time, really.

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Anyway, the lefty spin of the day is over Pelosi's “torture” lies. What the left is selling itself is a claimed “lack of understanding” over why those of us on the right are so exercised over the lies that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is telling concerning when and of what she knew about the enhanced interrogations being carried out by the CIA and others of America's intelligence forces. You see, instead of trying to wrestle with their consciences over her lies and her obvious tacit, half decade of support for what they consider “torture,” the left has decided to worry more about why the right is so upset at Pelosi. I guess that is preferable to introspection. Less mental anguish that-a-way, I suppose. So as it happens, many on the left are asking some questions of the right on this Pelosi business. After I saw the question on my aquaintence’s blog, I took a look around the web and saw it in multiple places. I’ll give two sources shortly, but I saw these themes on more than a few lefty sites. They are essentially asking why we would be upset at Pelosi for being quiet about the “torture” over the last few years? How can we justify being mad at her for doing what we obviously think was a good thing? If she was quiet that whole time why attack her for what she knew? What makes us so mad about the whole thing? The second aspect of their spin is that the right is still the worse party because calling Pelosi a hypocrite over her sudden desire to prosecute Bush officials over “torture” means that she did know “torture” was carried out. This line of lefty thinking posits that we are mad that our “torture” program is being revealed so, while Pelosi may be a hypocrite, her being so pales in comparison to Republicans being pro-torture. Ergo, they can still stomach a lying, hypocrite that made a bad choice of staying quiet because we approve of torture. (How’s that for a pretzel?) Perhaps you can see their dilemma under their terms? Of course, the main problem with their somewhat warped view of the situation is based on faulty premises all the way around. Their first wrong-headed premise, and the most important one here, is that Republicans are “pro-torture.” This assumes that waterboarding is torture and also assumes that we on the right consider it as such. This, however, is completely wrong. No one on the right is a supporter of torture, nor do any of us agree that sleep depravation, waterboarding, or the other items that comprise “enhanced interrogation” is torture. So, their very first premise, the one that undergirds their entire argument, is faulty. We just aren't “pro-torture.” Secondly, we on the right are not mad that Pelosi kept quiet before. We would be just fine with her ignoring the whole debate now — and that would include not pressing the absurd idea of prosecutions of Bush officials today. She is a hypocrite on the issue not because she is lying about what she knew and when she knew it but that she is attempting to use the “torture” issue only now when she thinks it might pay her political dividends. If she was so upset over “torture” as she now claims to be, why did she remain quiet all this time until now? Of course we all know that the answer is that it is only now when her party is in control of Congress and the White House. It is now that she feels she can safely use the debate as a political football. But the very fact that she is only bringing it all up now proves that the idea of “torture” really doesn't bother her at all and never did. It can't have ever truly bothered her because if it so horrified her, why was she quiet for so many years? And her claim that she didn't know is simply a lie. There isn't a soul in any position to really know that is backing her play. Porter Goss, Leon Pannetta, Pelosi's own staff, and her own past actions prove she knew everything there was to know. So…

• We aren't mad that a “torture” program is exposed because none of us agree there ever was any torture carried out
• We aren't mad that Pelosi was quiet for half the decade
• We aren't even mad that she's a hypocrite. After all, we all assume one must be a hypocrite to be a Democrat in the first place. That is a given!

Here is what we see with the issue:

• Pelosi never cared about “torture” in the first place because she went half a decade without protesting it even as she knew all about it
• She knows that the U.S. wasn't torturing anyone but now pretends we were merely for the sake of politics
• She is only now raising the issue because she thinks she can make political hay out of it proving she has no real principles
• She is playing politics with our national security
• The left is stupidly covering for someone that they would call a “war criminal” if only they'd have had an “R” next to their name

So, there you have it. A little example of how the left twists itself into a pretzel to explain away its own failings and that of its fellows. An Olympic gymnast could not bend himself in half so effectively as the unprincipled American left does to explain away their own hypocrisy.