Pelosi makes noise about investigations

Nancy Pelosi appeared on Fox News this morning and made some noise about possible investigations into the criminal activity within the Bush White House. ThinkProgress reports,

On Fox News Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she was open to pursuing investigations of abuses by the Bush Justice Department. “I think that we have to learn from the past and we cannot let the politicizing, for example, of the Justice Department, to go unreviewed,” Pelosi said. “Past is prologue. We learn from it.” Asked if she wants to see investigations, Pelosi responded, “Well, I want to see the truth come forth.”

This has sent the electronic media into a tizzy - HuffPo, Politico, Washington Monthly and Michelle Malkin (among others) jumped on the story. Are these bloggers and reporters really falling for this? Do they really believe that Nancy Pelosi is actually going to move forward on any of these investigations? I hate to burst everyone's bubble but Pelosi will never let such investigations to actually gain traction. Earlier this week Eric Posner had a very perceptive post up about this very subject. He wrote,

4. Back to politics. One can easily imagine the defense strategy, which will start by calling to the stand various Democratic senators and representatives who had been informed of the interrogation tactics and did not publicly object to them at the time. The testimony would surely be entertaining, as the politicians would be put in the impossible position of either admitting their moral complicity, which would make the entire trial look like a political show trial designed to punish Republicans but not Democrats, or looking like cowards who knew that the government was breaking the law but despite their oath to the Constitution were unwilling to do anything about it. Do Obama and Holder really want to put leaders of their own party in Congress in this position?

This is exactly right. There can be no investigation because high ranking Democratic lawmakers were complicit in much of the lawbreaking. Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, Diane Feinstein and others were aware of what was happening and they said and did nothing... until the 2006 elections. They used outrage at the Bush administration as an effective political weapon in the 2006 elections, regained control of Congress and upon taking office promptly dropped investigations from the agenda.

Pelosi is feeding a little red meat to the base, nothing more. She has no intention to act on these statements.