No Sale, Nancy

When Nancy Pelosi gets called a San Francisco liberal, what I think is, "Way to sum up what I like about her.'' Tough, liberal, feminine, liberal – and somehow, both completely traditional and as far out there as you can get without falling into the ocean. We both love Armani, even if only one of us can afford him. When she became Speaker, I dragged my daughter to her swearing in.

Of course, I also quite like my kids – but that does not mean I believe every word they say. And much as I admire Pelosi, I did not find what she came out with today too convincing.

At her weekly press conference this morning, Pelosi tried to stick to her original story that she was never briefed on the waterboarding of terror detainees. But she also acknowledged for the first time that she did know, at least of as February 2003, that America was using this method of interrogation, even though it's defined as torture and barred under the Geneva Conventions.

"I wasn't briefed,'' she explained today. "I was informed someone else had been briefed." That someone being her top security adviser.

Parsing isn't pretty, is it?

At the CIA briefing she did attend, in September 2002, she said today that "We were told that water boarding was not being used." Which is not the way her Republican counterpart at that meeting, Porter Goss, remembers it. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote, "I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed.''

Again like my children when they're trying to talk their way out of trouble, Pelosi was suspiciously focused on what others had done wrong; she accused the CIA of misleading her. Was she really accusing the CIA of lying at that briefing in 2002? "Yes," she told reporters, "I am saying the CIA was misleading the Congress and at the same time the administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

While I have no trouble believing that the Bush administration did attempt to mislead all of us on any number of matters, including WMDs, that's not exactly the subject at hand. I don't see the current CIA director, her fellow Democrat Leon Panetta, rushing in to defend her version of events. And I'm sorry to say that what I find far more likely is Republican Minority Leader John Boehner's argument today in response to Pelosi's accusations: "When you look at the number of briefings that the Speaker was in, and other Democrat members of the House and Senate, it's – it's pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were. They were well aware that they had been used."

Her frenemy Jane Harman, who replaced her on the House Intelligence Committee, did write to the CIA's counsel to express her concern about waterboarding. But because Harman was the ranking member on that committee, she was the person to write such a letter, Pelosi argued today. Only, Pelosi was minority leader at the time, and as such would certainly have had the standing to pick up paper and pen, too, had she wanted to. Her argument that writing a letter would not have changed anything is kind of shocking if you think about it; does that mean that every constituent who writes in to disagree with her is wasting his time?

Generally speaking, "I was misled," is a tricky position for any government or company official to take, because it's an admission that you were distracted, gullible, or incompetent. Either that, or you're just not telling the truth.

So when Pelosi accused Republicans of trying to deflect attention from their own actions by implicating Democrats, I both believed her and didn't want to hear it. "They don't want the focus on them,'' she said, "so they try to turn the attention on us." Which may be true, but it's also what she was doing today.