No, that question is not about George Bush. No need to apologize if that’s what you were thinking — I can see how he might leap to mind. No, this one’s about the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. She promised to bring us the most principled, honest, transparent Congress in history. Perhaps she’s just showing us by example what unprincipled and dishonest are first, so that we will know honesty and principle when we see it at some point in the future. Here’s a one paragraph summary of what happened in the last week or two, for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention:

Pelosi and several other Democrats lend support to the idea that the Justice Department needs to investigate the lawyers who informed former President Bush that water boarding was legal, and want a “Truth Commission” to investigate everything. Karl Rove defends his administration, saying that Pelosi and others in Congress knew about everything the CIA was doing all along, so if these lawyers are guilty of something, Pelosi is just as culpable. Pelosi says that she was never told the CIA was water boarding. She refines her statement later, saying that she was told that the Bush administration had some opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel saying that water boarding is legal and that it might be used in the future, but that she was never told anyone was actually doing it. It is revealed that her aide was present at a briefing, along with important committee leaders of both parties from the House and Senate, where it is revealed that terrorist Abu Zubaydah was in fact water boarded. Past tense, as in “it happened” not “it might happen.” Pelosi says she was never directly told, so she didn’t know about it. But she also says she was against the practice — you know, the practice she didn’t know was happening — but never went on the record because it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. Then she has a press conference and changes her story again (she has to get her notes out and read it verbatim to remember what her story is this time). This time she says that the CIA, who came out with a list of all the briefings she was at where water boarding was discussed, is lying about what was in their briefings and she was never told anything about water boarding. The CIA produces evidence that she was in fact told, and director Leon Panetta says that the CIA does not lie or misrepresent anything to Congress. Pelosi says she wasn’t really trying to blame it on the good people at the CIA — it was just that Bush twisted everything.

Just think about everything that has to be true for Nancy Pelosi to be telling the truth. Her aide has to have never told her anything about water boarding and did not take any notes on it at the briefing on Abu Zubaydah. (Her aide has not said a word — you’d think that if her story was true and he had never told her, he’d come forward and say that to defend her, but he’s keeping quiet.) She had to have never had any discussions with any of the other Democrats that were at those briefings about what happened. In order for her to be telling the truth, she has to be horrendously incompetent. But does anyone really think she’s telling the truth? I think you know where I stand on this one.

I didn’t think there would be anybody defending her, but it appears Katrina vanden Heuvel is making excuses for her. Here’s what she said today on This Week with George Stephanopolous:

I am not here to absolve or condemn Nancy Pelosi. I am saying we need to use this time to get to the truth of what a party in power in 2002, with all the power in the world, did in terms of briefings. Insufficient, incomplete briefings on a range of issues: WMDs, 9/11 Commission, Iraq. We need to use that. We need to declassify the briefings materials.

Katrina’s explanation: the briefing Pelosi received must have been incomplete and insufficient. Heck, it was Bush’s people, so they must have lied to everyone because, well, that’s just what Bush does. Never mind that Leon Panetta said that “contemporaneous records” indicated that she was in fact told that water boarding occurred to Abu Zubaydah. Never mind that other Democrats who were there, like Jay Rockefeller, Ben Nelson, and Jane Harmon (from the same state as Mrs. Pelosi), remember being told that we had used the practice. In fact, Jane Harmon reacted so negatively to the news that she went on the record and stated her opposition to the practice. Pelosi somehow never found out about that?

(Rhetorical question: If these briefings are classified, how does Katrina know how insufficient and incomplete they are? Hmmmm.)

What exactly is Pelosi’s defense? She says that she was told that water boarding “might be” used in the future at one briefing in 2002. So she finds out there’s a horrible, immoral practice (a practice so evil that she wants the Justice Department to prosecute lawyers for even suggesting to Bush that it might be lawful), and her strategy apparently is to wait until it’s actually used before stating any opposition to it? It’s either that, or she was actually told about it and knew about it and just wanted to go along with it because it was 2002 after all and, like most Americans, she thought that anything we might have to do to prevent another terrorist attack was something we would just plain have to do. That’s the choice here as I see it: either Pelosi is incompetent and doesn’t remember anything and never writes anything down, or she knew about it and was okay with it and didn’t have the conviction Jane Harmon had to oppose it, and now she’s lying about it to try to score political points. She wanted to stick it to the Bush administration officials who decided to use water boarding, and it came back to bite her bigtime. I don’t remember another time in recent memory when a political ploy backfired this badly…