The Republicans have a strange fetish:

Republican leaders say that as the 2010 congressional races heat up, they will continue to attack House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ’s assertions that the CIA misled her during a classified briefing on interrogation techniques.

Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Pelosi’s comments will be a prominent theme as the GOP looks to oust vulnerable Democrats in swing districts.

“The Speaker has raised an allegation that on its face is very serious. . . . . She threw down the gauntlet,” Sessions said. He said the GOP had yet to develop new campaign advertising to attack Pelosi, but would probably produce such messages later in the 2010 campaign. “We’ll let you know when we have them,” Sessions said in an interview.

You can walk into any bar in this country, from a redneck Honky Tonk in Western Michigan to an all-black bar in North Philly, and you’ll find near unanimous consensus that the CIA is in the business of bullshitting the people of this country. If you try to run down the military in those places you might get your ass kicked. But run down the CIA? Hell, you’ll probably get your ass kicked for defending them. It isn’t that the CIA is all that unpopular exactly, it’s just that everyone enjoys sharing their own conspiracy theories about them. They don’t want to listen to nonsense about how the CIA is on the up-and-up. They know that’s horsecrap.

So, crafting a whole political campaign on the premise that it’s some kind of gay San Francisco heresy to question the integrity of the CIA is more than a little loopy. People love their country and don’t like to hear a bunch of liberal whining about why it sucks. That’s true. But they aren’t going to get all upset if someone states the obvious, which is that the CIA doesn’t tell Congress jackshit and half the shit they tell Congress is a lie.

On the other hand, the Research 2000 Weekly Tracking Poll shows that Pelosi took a major hit from all the criticism she has received over this episode. That’s because people think she’s lying, not because she talked shit about the CIA. The GOP wants to weaken Pelosi so that they can use her against vulnerable Democrats. In that sense, these attacks make sense. It’s not the specific topic that matters because anything could serve the same purpose if it raised doubts about Pelosi’s credibility.

The Republicans would be smart to use this incident as a stepping stone to raising further questions about Pelosi’s integrity rather than trying to convince people that the CIA was telling the truth. Eventually, Pelosi will be vindicated and the Republican attack-line will fall flat. It’s kind of like the debate over whether we really found WMD in Iraq. It worked for a while to say we did. Now, people just laugh at you.

The fact of the matter is that most people don’t share the Republicans’ deep-seated belief that no institution in our country can be criticized. The CIA, least of all.