RUSH: Cindy Sheehan, as you know, made it official. She's going to run against Nancy Pelosi in her San Francisco district in 2008. She was on Scarborough's show today on MSNBC via phone, and Scarborough said, "Now, you've been critical of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Party. You made a lot of people in the Democrat Party very angry." What did I miss? What has she made angry in the Democrat Party? Who in the Democrat Party has been mad at her? Tell me. Have I missed something? I don't know of anybody who's mad at her in the Democrat Party. Anyway... "Talk about, for us, Cindy, how it's been for you to be attacked by Democrats when you were saying the same thing about Republicans when they were in charge?"
SHEEHAN: Democrats have made me very angry. Democrats have made a lot of people in this country angry. They should be the party of change; they should be the party that brings our troops home, and they're not. They still, even when they have a Republican-controlled Congress, the Democrats are complicit, many of them. There are good Democrats and a few good Republicans, but that we're angry. We're angry that they are not doing what we elected them for, and that's to bring the troops home, to bring George Bush and Dick Cheney, to hold them accountable. And I think that we have to look at each person, not their party, not say, "Oh, we're going to give her or we're going to give him a free pass because they're a Democrat, but we're going to attack the Republicans just because they're a Republican," and I know there's some Republicans who have also governed with integrity.
RUSH: So that's Nancy Pelosi's opponent coming up in the '08 elections. Now, I had a story on Pelosi from yesterday's stack, and I didn't have a chance to get to it. It's from the Washington Post on Monday. "Edging Away From Inner Circle, Pelosi Asserts Authority -- In February, only a month after becoming speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi settled weeks of threats from Rep. John D. Dingell, her blustery Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, by putting in writing her assent to one of his big demands -- Pelosi's new Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming would not infringe on his power to write legislation as he saw fit. Four months later, Dingell (D-Mich.) appeared in the speaker's conference room to walk through a bill that would override California's attempts to combat global warming by raising fuel efficiency standards, strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases and promote a controversial effort to turn coal into liquid fuel. This time, Pelosi was in no mood to mollify Dingell. The bill he was sponsoring, she said, was unacceptable. The environmental costs would be too severe, the political costs for the Democratic caucus too high, she said. The two episodes," says the Washington Post, "with Dingell illustrate Pelosi's evolution from a somewhat tentative political figure reliant on a small circle of advisers to the undisputed leader of the House's fractious Democratic majority.
"'Nancy now represents the majority of this caucus, overwhelmingly,' said Barney Frank (Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. But if Pelosi has succeeded in uniting her party during her initial months as speaker, she and the rest of the leadership have yet to convince the nation that the Democrats can govern." Well, that's what this Post story is all about, don't you see? Isn't it interesting that we get poll after poll showing Congress' approval numbers --and Pelosi's personal numbers as well as Dingy Harry's are way, way down, plummeting -- and we get a little puff piece in the Washington Post about how brilliantly she's taken over that caucus and she's not letting the other guys that have been around a long time steamroll her? I guess it's a good thing that the Democrats do not get named by the Drive-By Media like Republicans did, because DeLay was "the Hammer." Well, this is "the Purse." Nancy Pelosi is "the Purse." She's up there banging these guys with the purse. She's pursing them into doing what she wants them to do. So we get this piece that is designed to boost her numbers and to talk about how great a leader she is, how she's growing in office, and she's "started tentatively." Started tentatively? The woman started thinking that she'd been elected to presidency.
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Read the Background Material...
AP: Sheehan Launches Pelosi Challenge
WP: Edging Away From Inner Circle, Pelosi Asserts Authority
