Nancy Pelosi Stands Up for Justice, the Truth, and Slaps Down a Bushevik Reporter on CNN! We Love the New Nancy! Remember, to Beat Back the Republican Putsch, You Must Give as Good as You Get!

It was an interesting bit of theater. Kyra Phillips interviewed Nancy Pelosi. Diane04 has the complete transcript at Kos. Why everyone is excited about Pelosi is this—

PELOSI: Kyra, Kyra, Kyra...

PHILLIPS: It's Kyra. It's Kyra.

PELOSI: ... if you want to make a case for the White House, you should go on their payroll. But the (INAUDIBLE)...

The remark seems to have rankled, because Phillips returned to it near the close of the interview—

PHILLIPS: And by all due respect, nobody in this organization or any network is on the payroll of the Bush administration right now. Everybody has been challenging every leader in every agency in this disaster, because it's pathetic to see something like this happen in the United States and to see dead bodies still on the ground in -- on American soil. It is absolutely pathetic.

It's a little incoherent. I don't know what she means by "this organization or any network"? And I love the "right now." But she ended on as strong an editorial comment as you could wish. And perhaps Pelosi deserves credit for eliciting the statement.

But truth be told, Phillips asked Pelosi a question in the middle of the interview that deserves a better answer, or I should say a real answer.

PHILLIPS: You think politics had nothing to do with this disaster right now?

PELOSI: What I'm saying is, let's form an independent commission to look into that, to make an assessment of what the decisions were made...
....

PHILLIPS: All right, let me about [ask] you about an independent commission, because I addressed this to Senator Collins, and I addressed this to Senator Lieberman the other day. I mean, we had warnings before 9/11. We knew that there were intelligence failures. We knew where Osama bin Laden was. We knew there were issues among our intelligence agencies, and 9/11 happened, and then there were all these reports and all these investigations and all these commissions that were formed, and all this focus on terrorism.

Now, you had all these reports that were put forward talking about how this was going to happen to New Orleans, that Hurricane Pam, this project that was put forward, was showing and revealing all these problems with the levees and the hurricane -- or the flooding systems there. And we heard from the Army Corps of Engineer.

Now we see, despite all those warnings, what happened in New Orleans and what happened to other states. And now all of a sudden, everybody wants more investigations and more commissions. I mean, this is pathetic. How many things...

PELOSI: It is pathetic. It is pathetic.

PHILLIPS: ... have to go wrong in our country, and how many...
...

investigations and commissions do we need?

And this was Pelosi's pathetic answer—

PELOSI: We need as many until we make the country safer for the American people. We all have to settle down and take a deep breath, and say, How do we make the American people safer? And in order to do that, we have to have an assessment of how this happened.

First she implies that investigations and commissions are the appropriate tools for making the country safer. To paraphrase a saying, a lunatic is a person who makes a mistake and then goes on making it.

Then she asks us all to meditate and ponder the question "How do we make the American people safer?" mantra-fashion, it seems.

And then she would treat us all to another assessment (through an investigation by a commission or committee, of course).

As though wishing to disprove her own idea, Pelosi went on to say—

But let's take a very objective, nonpartisan look at this. We have a great example in the 9/11 commission, where people, in a bipartisan way, nonpartisan way, made an assessment of what happened leading up to 9/11 and what we can do to go forward to make America safer.

Do people still say "Oh, barf!"?

No. Kyra Phillips' question—How many things have to go wrong in our country, and how many investigations and commissions do we need?—may be dismissed as rhetorical because it's framed rhetorically. But it's a serious question that deserves an answer.

The question that Pelosi along with all her Congressional co-conspirators need to answer is this—We have already had Congressional investigations and commissions looking into what was needed in the event of a disaster such as Katrina. The results are as we see them. And many other examples, perhaps none so horrific as the current one, could be cited of post-investigation, post-commission failure.

Why should the American public tolerate more of the same? The public should know by now that these investigations aren't held for the public good but for the protection and self-aggrandizement it affords the politicians. Isn't it time that questions such as "Why didn't we save a city?" be taken out of the hands of politicians and reviewed by disaster planners and scientists? After all, Congress thought it wise to recuse itself from decisions by the Federal Reserve.

Maybe the commission that we really need would investigate in what other areas the public interest would be served by the creation of truly independent bodies shielded from partisan politics. Like public broadcasting, for instance.

Pelosi and all our Congressional leaders need to stop evading Kyra Phillips' question and give the public an honest answer. And the public needs to demand it.