Pelosi Hurting Dems, Obama

From the AP's Larry Margasak via Yahoo News:
Barack Obama warned Democrats in Congress against making a partisan cause out of the Bush administration's harsh interrogation tactics.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is ignoring him — loudly — and the party, from the president on down, may pay the price.
So far, it's Pelosi who's suffered the greatest harm.
It may never be resolved exactly when she first learned that waterboarding had been used against terror suspects — in 2002 when she was the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee or five months later after she became her party's leader.
But the Democrats' claim to the moral high ground on the issue has been blemished by her explanation this week that in early 2003 she shifted her attention to winning political control of the House and didn't wage a protest against what she now calls torture.
She says the CIA and the Bush administration misled her about when the waterboarding, which simulates drowning, began. But Republicans don't have to fight that battle. They only have to keep the focus on her, and they have done that well — as evidenced by her multiple attempts to explain herself.
Americans already know the ending to this movie that's being played backward: Detainees were waterboarded, head-slammed, face-slapped, stripped naked and deprived of sleep. If the public isn't outraged already, will hearings to show who did what in the Bush administration gain converts? . . .
The biggest sign that the effort could backfire politically came from President Obama.
On April 21, addressing congressional proposals for a bipartisan commission to study the interrogations, the president said: "I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations."
If Obama is right, Democrats could be perceived as harming national security. That would be a major stumble that could give the Republicans an issue in next year's congressional elections.