More Please

The Dems continue their march into the long night of irrelevancy and minority status as they once again display a tin ear and prove they are out of step with the American public.

• House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) risked a case of whiplash by leaping so quickly in front of the media to politize a natural disaster of bibical proportions. One wonders if how high the body count must rise before Pelosi finds such a manuveur unseemly?

• Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) rose to protest the Ohio election results and Rep. Maxine Waters of California, said she was "ashamed to say" that Mr. Blackwell(Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell) is black. Mrs. Waters, who is also black, said "their ancestors would be rolling in their graves". ?! When will it occur to voters allegedly disinfranchised that it is Democrats who control local government in the Blue wards and districts, thus their polling places?

  Mrs. Boxer had objected to counting Ohio's 20 electoral votes, citing reports from that state of long lines and too few machines at Democrat-leaning polling places, voters leaving without having a chance to vote, disparities between counties in the percentage of provisional ballots counted and standards for voter-registration forms.

  Democrat-leaning? Jeebus, can the MSM get anymore up the Dem's butt?

• However the Clueless Award of the very short year must go to Senator Edward Kennedy, who is reputed to have the smartest staff on the hill, for this exhange at the Gonzales hearing:

  KENNEDY: Now, the Post article states you chaired several meetings at which various interrogation techniques were discussed. These techniques included the threat of live burial and waterboarding, whereby the detainee is strapped to a board, forcibly pushed under water, wrapped in a wet towel and made to believe he might drown. The article states that you raised no objection...

  KENNEDY: Could you just -- I want to point out, if it's true, as the Post reported, that you held several meetings at which the legality of interrogation techniques, such as threat of live burial and water boarding were discussed...

  KENNEDY: Well, just as an attorney, as a human being, I would have thought that if there were recommendations that were so blatantly and flagrantly over the line in terms of torture, that you might have recognized them. I mean, it certainly appears to me that water boarding, with all its descriptions about drowning someone to that kind of a point, would come awfully close to getting over the border, and that you'd be able to at least say today, There were some that were recommended or suggested on that, but I certainly wouldn't have had a part of that, as a human being.

  In an aside, The Washington Post seems to have missed part of the dialog or is blatantly editing the exchange:

  Gonzales acknowledged under questioning from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) that he took part in discussions about the legality of high-pressure interrogation techniques. But he said it was not his "job to decide which methods of obtaining information from terrorists would be most effective" or whether such methods are prohibited by a 1994 law barring torture.

  "That would be a job for the Department of Justice, and I never . . . influenced or pressured the department to bless any of those techniques," he said.

  Kennedy responded that "just as an attorney, as a human being, I would have thought that . . . if there were recommendations that were so blatantly and flagrantly over the line in terms of torture, that you would have recognized them."

Rove and Melman couldn't make this up.