Speaker Pelosi has a new excuse for not opposing waterboarding.

It sort of stops working after the third try, you know.

The Speaker of the House has come up with yet another reason for why she didn’t say anything about waterboarding at the time:

Pelosi defense: couldn’t object in ’03

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned in early 2003 that the Bush administration was waterboarding terror detainees but didn’t protest directly out of respect for “appropriate” legislative channels, a person familiar with the situation said Monday.

The Pelosi camp’s version of events is intended to answer two key questions posed by her critics: When, precisely, did she first learn about waterboarding? And why didn’t she do more to stop it?

Because, apparently, “All along” and “because it didn’t poll well at the time” won’t satisfy anybody at this point. Both Cold Fury and AoSHQ have a good deal of righteous scorn on this one; I’m just going to touch fairly briefly on what this means, going forward.

This story is going to have at least one useful quality to it: we’re going to see who really is an independent voice among the Online Left now. Objectively speaking, it’s obvious to anybody that Pelosi’s simply trying to come up with a story that will be plausible enough to give her some kind of cover; usually, this doesn’t work. But while the Democrats can successfully jettison Murtha, or Dodd, or Visclosky, or Moran, or Burris, or Patrick, or Specter, or Feinstein, or Rangel, or Paterson, or Hastings, or Murray, or Gordon, or [insert your favorite disliked Democrat here]… they can’t jettison the Speaker of the House, if for no other reason than that she’ll almost certainly take anybody who tries out with her. This means that they’re pretty much forced to defend her. So, when you see somebody repeating this latest nonsense, or whatever they’ll come up tomorrow: rest assured, that person’s getting a paycheck from the Democratic Establishment somehow.

Or else is sucking up for one. Which in many ways is even more pathetic.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.