There is a a certain poetic justice in the travails of the Democratic Speaker of the House. She joined her partisan colleagues in the zeal to prosecute Bush Administration officials for what the MSM has labeled “torture memos.” And now it seems her grandstanding may cost her her job, possibly hurting her party’s standing with the general public.

No one seems to believe Nancy Pelosi.

Having promised “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history,” Mrs. Pelosi now becomes emblematic of an institution in which the Democratic culture of corruption (to borrow an expression of which she was once so fond) rivals (and perhaps exceeds) that of the last Republican Congress.

You know a Democrat’s in trouble when the editorialist of the Washington Post question her credibility: “Ms. Pelosi’s shifting accounts and faltering performance at her news conference were far from reassuring.”

As she begins to lose the trust of a number in the MSM who would normally be sympathetic to her, she does what most Democrats do when the spotlight is turned on them: blame Bush. “Pelosi issued a statement late Friday shifting her criticism to the Bush administration — hours after CIA Director Leon Panetta defended his agency against Pelosi’s charges.”

Part of that criticism was to accuse Bush and his team of lying us into war in Iraq. Never mind that those who leveled the charge could not point to a single statement that then-President made that he knew was wrong at the time he made it. Now, we have an example of a claim Pelosi made with ample evidence indicating that she knew it was false at the time she made.

(In her defense, maybe she had forgotten what she learned during those CIA briefings in 2002-03. But, instead of faulting her memory, she has accused the CIA of misleading Congress.)

It will be interesting to see if the same left-wing bloggers who repeated the mantra that Bush lied (without providing any actual evidence that he did) will similarly criticize the Democratic Speaker for her dishonesty (with substantial evidence that she lied).

Instapundit Reader Doug Welsh finds a similarity between “Nancy Pelosi’s current circumstances [and] Democrats’ accusations that Bush lied us into the Iraq war“:

They saw the same intelligence that Bush (and Clinton before him) saw, indicating that Saddam had WMD. Few if any questioned the validity of the information. Most voted for the war. But when the war became unpopular they turned and claimed they had been misled by Bush. This was all a lie and political posturing, but it was effective then.

Pelosi’s penchant for political posturing, her eagerness to go after the Bush Administration even after W left town, has now cost her credibility. It may even cost her her job — and even threaten her party’s majority.

Crossposted at GayPatriot.

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