Pelosi And That Message

Seriously, is Nancy Pelosi becoming the new Hillary Clinton for the extreme right? She can't blow her nose nowadays without some uber-right pundits popping up to decry her desecration of Bush's no-booger policy and claim that the only way to correctly rid one's nose of boogers is with a 2,000lb bunker-buster.

And then it turns out she was only scratching her nose, not booger-mining after all...

Today, the outrage is all directed at her meeting with Assad of Syria. Yesterday, the booger-hunting story was that Bush had decreed that no-one should ever talk to Syria ever again (except for the Republicans he sent a few days ago, and the Europeans who have ignored his idiotic macho-man talk all along). So Pelosi goes anyway, and conveys a message from the Israelis - one that it should have been Condi Rice's job to give only Bush won't let her do her job. Damn, said the rightwingers.

But "Aha!", up pops a statement from the Israeli PM which they can now pounce upon and claim Pelosi got the message wrong. And in their zeal to stomp any nasal mining not officially sanctioned by the Decider (remember those Republicans he sent?) they duly do so.

Allahpundit / Hot Air: Did Pelosi give Assad the wrong message from Israel?
Ed Morrissey / Captain's Quarters: Why Foreign Policy Belongs In The Executive Branch
Gateway Pundit: Oops!... Pelosi Gave Wrong Message to Syrian Regime

Ed Morrissey speaks for them all:

Pelosi somehow forgot the part about ending support for terrorism when she met with Assad. She told the Syrian dictator that Israel was ready to meet with Assad on a peace proposal, which only told part of the story. In delivering only part of the message, Pelosi not only arrogated to herself the role of American foreign policy director -- which Condoleezza Rice has as Secretary of State -- she did the same with Israel's foreign policy as well.

Not a bad night's work for an incompetent.

The trouble is - Pelosi got the message straight. The New York Times has the details:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her delegation said they had frank words with President Bashar al-Assad and other senior Syrian officials here on Wednesday, pressing the president over Syria’s support for militant groups and insisting that his government block militants seeking to cross into Iraq and join insurgents there.

...Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Ms. Pelosi announced that she had conveyed a message to Mr. Assad from Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, that he was ready to negotiate for peace.

Shortly afterward, however, Mr. Olmert’s office issued a clarification of his message, insisting that, “although Israel is interested in peace with Syria, that country continues to be part of the axis of evil and a force that encourages terror in the entire Middle East.”

To begin serious peace negotiations, the Israeli statement said, Syria must end its support of terrorism and its sponsorship of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad organizations; refrain from providing weapons to Hezbollah and bringing about the destabilizing of Lebanon; stop its support of terrorism in Iraq; and relinquish the strategic ties it is building with the government in Iran.

Members of the delegation said that among the issues they took up in Damascus was the case of the three Israeli soldiers being held by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah — which is supported by Iran — and the Palestinian group Hamas.

...Ms. Pelosi, who left for Saudi Arabia, took pains at the news conference to insist that she was not contradicting the Bush administration’s actual policies in the Middle East.

“There is no division on policy between us and President Bush, be it on Israel, Palestine or Syria,” she told reporters before leaving Damascus International Airport. “As a mother I will exhaust every remedy for peace.”

Some local commentators used that comment as a springboard for criticism of Ms. Pelosi.

“There was a feeling that this visit had more to do with domestic politics than us,” said one, Jihad Yaziji, editor in chief of “The Syria Report,” an online magazine, who attended a dinner in honor of Ms. Pelosi on Tuesday night. “If she isn’t going to be very different from Bush, then why did she come?”

It seems clear that Olmert's statement wasn't aimed at Pelosi, but at the American Right and its media stenographers for having selectively quoted Pelosi in order to create an unhelpful faux-scandal out of whole cloth and because they totally misunderstood why he gave her the message to pass on in the first place.

Writes The Times: "At the White House on Tuesday, President Bush told reporters that he saw little point in talking to Syria now. “Sending delegations hasn’t worked,” he said. “It’s just simply been counterproductive.”" Obviously Olmert disagrees - just like everyone else outside the Bush cheerleader squad - believing you can send a tough message while still talking. Pelosi passed on that tough message at his request.

Back to booger-hunting, Ed. If only Nancy was married to Bill Clinton, it would be so much easier.