It’s in extraordinarily bad taste for Nancy Pelosi’s staffers to justify their capitulation on the FISA issue to Time on strictly political grounds.
“For any Republican-leaning district this would have been a huge issue,” says a top Pelosi aide, who estimates that as many as 10 competitive races could have been affected by it.
Pelosi’s decision is fateful. As Glenn Greenwald explains, this decision has created a new alliance.
Our campaign just exceeded $300,000 yesterday. We’re going to announce the details behind the Money Bomb part of the campaign, coordinated by those responsible for the Ron Paul money bombs, very shortly. I can’t think of a better explanation for the strategy we’ve adopted than this Time article and what it’s conveying about the mindset of Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democratic Congressional leaders. This model of an ideologically diverse coalition, devoted to battling the political establishment’s endless expansion of unchecked power, is creating real turmoil and disruption in Britain, and that model can work here, too.
For the first time, the blogosphere is teaming up with libertarians to defeat and harass incumbent Democrats. This is a direct result of Pelosi’s decision. This was what I was hinting at in my Tsunami Interruptus piece, where I talked about a generational misunderstanding.
