The recent trip to Syria by house Speaker Pelosi has once again brought out the right wing portable punditry to lie, smear and spin. This time, the hypocrisy and lying is easy to spot. But only if you take your blinders off.
The biggest hypocrisy over the trip was concerning the fact that republicans had made the trip to speak to Syrian leaders over the current situations in the region. Of course, the "counter-spin" was singling out Pelosi as "speaker" and therefore was somehow different than ay other congressional leader.
I totally disagree with that, in fact, if anyone is going to represent the Congress, it should be the leadership. She has every right to go herself or choose who should go if she chooses not to. And considering that Pelosi merely reinforced our President's message on terrorism, she was not doing anythhing "rogue" or counterproductive in my opinion. Neoconservatives like to make the charge that Pelosi was sending a different message than that of our leadership in the executive branch, even tho she wasn't. that's because the yfeel safe in assuming that no republican has never gone to a foreign country and worked against our President.
Then let's all get in the "way back" machine and go back to 1997 when future Speaker and Comittee chairman Dennis Hastert ventured down to Columbia at a time when the Clinton administration was negotiating and trying to attach certain human rights provisions to some security assistance programs. Did Hastert merely reinforce the White House message like Speaker Pelosi did in Syria?
No, he didn't.
In fact, Speaker Hastert's express mission was to instruct Columbia to "bypass" our executive branch and deal directly with Congress. Hastert even had his staff negotiating directly with Columbians even bypassing our embassy in Bogata.
So, in other words, the right wingers are trying to condemn Pelosi for not doing exactly what their cronies did do when they were in power. Total hypocrites. to further the hypocrisy, when Speaker Newt Gingrich stepped down after the 1998 elections, Hastert was rewarded for "bypassing" the aadministration with the Speaker of the House position.
But wait, there's more!
There also has been a deliberate campaign to lie and smear the trip. The claims are that the Speaker "lied" about a message from Isreal to Syria that she was asked to convey. But again, if you take off the blinders and look past the rhetoric you get to the truth pretty quickly.
While the neoconservative punditry was blathering about the Washington Post's unsubstiated claims of "lying" about a message from Isreal, the official White House statement, from the people who actually saw the readout of their discussions was a little different. Oh, and by the way, State Dept. officials also attended the meetings. Here's what White House spokesperson Brendan Daly wrote about the issue ...
Daly wrote..."WH has not said that because in fact the Speaker did not get the message wrong — she included the necessary caveats and did not say or imply that this was a change in Israel’s position.”
Hmmmmmm....
It's really sad how this Administration and their cronies continue to play their little smear games even when it is obvious that they are being total liars and hypocrites here.
And ones with very short memories apparantly.
Meanwhile, we are learning of the Justice Department perhaps using US Attorney David Iglasius's gaurd service to our nation against him when firing him. The justice dept. has emphasized (with underlines) Mr Iglasius's guard duty and twisted the time he was spending getting other soldiers ready to fight the war on terror into him being an "absentee manager." Someone forgot to tell the dept. that discriminating against our Armed Forces and their requirements of service is against the law. And so far, I don't think anyone has found any obscure sections of the Patriot Act that they can hide behind.
And we learn that no less than 2 brigades heading for Iraq are doing so without the proper and required training for fighting over there. Then President Bush slips in a 50,000 dollar donating "Swiftboater" a cushy ambassadorship after his name was withdrawn from nomination in the last congressional session.
On one hand bitching about Congress, on the other hand, using their recess to slide lying swiftboaters into official positions with our government.
The more you know about this administration, the worse they get.
note: ***this article was changed and edited due to a factual error on my part. i falsely stated that dennis hastert was speaker of the house in 1997 when he circumvented the administration in going to columbia. i was wrong. he was not speaker until 1999. i apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
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