Unfortunately this administraton do not see any hypocrisy between screaming about Nancy Pelosi going to Syria, and ANY Republican going to ANY country in ANY capacity.
That's because they simply assume that everyone agrees with their conspiracist paranoia: Bushco. are by nature patriotic and good for America, and Democrats are by nature treasonous and will serve to undermine the US of A.
So they see no contradiction. If Republican Congressmen go to Syria, they'll obviously put on cowboy hats, shove Assad down in his chair and slap him around while they sing Yankee Doodle Dandy, like Real Men would. If Nancy Pelosi goes to Syria, she's obviously going to bow down and promise to make California the first American State of the New Jihad Caliphate. That's how they see the world.
These "new" conservitive Republican politicians are the same people who reject any objective measurements on who is good or bad for U.S. and world security, since they would fail any such test.
The neocons, whose ranks include both officials and armchair intellectuals with considerable influence in the United States, Israel and in Lebanon, insist that Pelosi's move sent all the wrong messages to the region's "terrorists" and "terrorist enablers." A better approach, they argue, would be to continue to try to pressure and ignore states like Syria and Iran until they eventually collapse into submission.
But their prescription constitutes a willful denial of certain regional realities.
Pelosi repeated the usual demands of the Bush administration. She called upon Syria to tighten security on the borders with Iraq and exert more efforts to prevent the infiltration of foreign fighters whom she described as "killing American soldiers"
She asked the Syrian government to halt arms shipments to Hezbollah and Hamas and facilitate the establishment of the international tribunal, which is supposed to investigate the assassination of former Lebanese prime mister Rafik Hariri.
More interestingly, she asked Syria to help release the two captured Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, the incident that triggered the last summer's war in Lebanon.
In other words, Pelosi didn't make her own foreign policy, and took great pains to support the Administration's positions.
We shold also remember then speaker of the house Newt Gingrich trip to China in 1997. Back then, the media treated Gingrich like he was the American Prime Minister, and his right-wing supporters had no problem with the House Speaker travelling and expressing his own foreign policy views which deviated from the Clinton administration's.
They couldn't have been more pleased that Gingrich did what, in their minds, the Clinton administration was failing to do - standing up to the Chinese. Gingrich, as House Speaker, was heroic for going on his own and doing that.
And so, you see, there is a fundamental psychic necessity for rightwingers to take every dark impulse they feel, and attibute it to their perceived enemies. This logic absolutely, rigidly prevents any possible awareness of when they are doing something that they accuse others of doing.
The media establishment is going along with yet another White House charade, we shouldn't lose track of how the Pelosi story so perfectly dovetails with the preeminent Rovian myth: Democrats just aren't tough enough to deal with foreign policy.
My goodness, how can a woman hope to negotiate with bloodthirsty evildoers, wrapped in a headscarf no less?
What's interesting, and perhaps worthy of more study, is why the MSM is so enraptured with this particular line of testosterone-laden baloney. Clearly the love affair dates back to the Gingrich era:
Clinton would have been made to look a fool if he took a strong stance against Gingrich's "tough talk" with China.
And yet the crux of our American media is beholden to that group, takes its cues from it, and treats it like it defines the mainstream. Hence, Nancy Pelosi's belief in engaging the Syrians in dialogue - a belief endorsed by, among others: (a) the uber-establishment Baker-Hamilton Commission, (b) the Israeli government, and (c) the vast majority of American people.
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