Pelosi and Reid.

The strategy of targeting Blue Dogs is clean and ideologically pure, yet as the comments here demonstrate it risks being neither certain nor manageable, while failure could have broad and lasting adverse consequences. De-elect a Blue Dog without having a liberal Democrat elected in place? Or remove some Blue Dogs yet leave in place Democratic congressional management that is, in fact, far more directly responsible for what is allowed to be voted upon, how that is presented and, therefore, whether any legitimate progress can be made? Big risks here. I thought Opus007 phrased it most succintly back on page 14 of the comments:

"Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi were privy to the torture and the wire taps yet they did nothing and certainly want to avoid any consequences for themselves. So having them in such high powered Democratic positions coupled with the Blue Dogs leaves Democrats very weak. Reid and Pelosi should have stepped down- they are too tainted to be effective."

Nancy Pelosi's appearance on The Daily Show last night only sealed my belief that she, not any peripheral Blue Dog or even any combination of Blue Dogs, should be the target of any coordinated national focus. She obviously made it a condition of her appearance on the show that she not be asked about "impeachment issues" (and it is to Stewart's eternal shame that he acquiesced to such a demand, and if there was no such condition then failure to talk about it was inexcusable). But when Pelosi then tried to talk about how many wonderful things the Congress has "tried" to do, only to be "thwarted" by (1) those darn Republicans who vote as a block and (2) that poor Senate that "must" have 60 votes and has thus frustrated every effort by the House, it was all too much to bear.

The FISA amendments were Nancy Pelosi's doing, there is no way that bill could have been presented in the form and with the timing and limitations it had without her approval. The failure to proceed with impeachment proceedings against the most obvious criminal and traitor to the Constitution ever to occupy the White House is ENTIRELY her doing. And it's clear that she not only is responsible for these actions, she is herself complicit in the very events she is preventing investigations about. Her occupancy of the position of Speaker is a tragedy for the nation.

I'm disappointed and even actually surprised at the docility being displayed nationally in the wake of last Friday's abbreviated hearings on "impeachable offenses", especially with the punctuation of Stewart's mollycoddling of Pelosi last night. But when it comes to how to proceed on the national stage of electing a responsible government, I have to say that I end up favoring (1) electing a Democrat to the Presidency; (2) retaining Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress; (3) replacing the shameful leadership of both houses with persons whose allegiance to the United States Constitution is apparent (which is not the case for Pelosi or Reid); (4) increasing those Democratic majorities as much as possible and (5) replacing Blue Dog Democrats with other Democrats whereever possible. In that order of priority.

This Blue Dog strategy is not without merit and different people may prioritize differently, but in my view it is far more important to get a real Speaker of the House in place of Nancy Pelosi, and as to the Blue Dogs let a real Speaker of the House take care of putting them in line through the very real power available to a very real Speaker.

Tuning in late but I found interesting the dust-up over Oomex's suggestion that Pelosi's experience and seasoning was worth considering over Sheehan's lack of sophistication [this is a rough approximation that concedes lack of absolute precision, abbreviated here for effect and hopefully not for target practice].

I agree with those who come down on the "Sheehan" side of this, but for a slightly different reason: Pelosi is not just a congressperson, she is the Speaker of the House. I want her out of there not just because she is allowing the desecration of the Constitution, but because she is a practiced, accomplished and demonstrably competent at doing that. I want the Democratic Caucus to have to select a brand new Speaker because the old one was run out of town for exactly those reasons. And if the person taking the House seat of the deposed Speaker as a new, "mere" congressperson is naive and has a lot to learn about getting things done in politics, so much the better as the existing Democratic Caucus reflects on just how disgraceful the old, deposed "expert" was in the view of the electorate.

One against one for a "regular" seat, I'd lean to Oomex's concerns. But in this election for this seat, I don't care if a doorknob gets more votes than Nancy Pelosi, and I want it to be because the very "skills" she thinks make her wonderful are the very skills that, used as she has chosen to employ them, have enabled George W. Bush to remain in office.

So I think Oomex's premise is fine generally, but as applied in this exceptional circumstance it becomes part of the problem, not part of any solution.