This is Really Getting Ridiculous . . .

Because we don't really have any more pressing business to attend to, now do we:

MSNBC is reporting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will hold a vote early next week on whether to censure Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), unless he apologizes on the House floor for heckling the President.

This is cretin-level stupid for two reasons:

1. By dragging Joe Wilson into the well and humiliating him in front of his colleagues, you are only creating yet another martyr for the cause of Winger Jihad. The President doesn't seem to have gotten too excised over the matter, having graciously accepted Wilson's apology, such as it was, and moved on to more urgent issues. Perhaps the Speaker of the House might consider taking a tip from the President?

Then again, I nearly forgot that Nancy Pelosi's political instincts are so much keener than Barack Obama's. Silly me.

2. It's all about priorities, baby. You're willing to take the time during a legislative session to "get tough" with some hillbilly backbencher over a two-second outburst on the floor of the House. How about getting tough with Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo instead? How about getting tough with Citigroup, or United HealthCare, or Blue Cross/Blue Shield, or Roche Pharmaceuticals? How about getting tough with Monsanto or Peabody Coal? How about getting tough with your own warrantless-wiretapping, indefinite-detaining President? Or maybe you'd consider getting tough with the war criminals who preceded him in the Oval Office?

Oh, I'm sorry. That would require a bit of steely resolve, wouldn't it?

I think the problem is that this is a national security issue, and there are so many more challenging issues -- as one official put it to me the other day
-- on which the President has already shown some ankle, whether it's about talking to Iran or whether it's his rather pronounced silence vis-a-vis North Korea, or whether it's something as minuscule as lifting some travel restrictions on Cuban Americans for Cuba. They don't believe they can show another square centimeter of ankle on national security, because the Republicans will eat their lunch, and every time I'm told this I die laughing. I say, your guys are captured by the Sith Lord, Dick Cheney, you're captured by Rush Limbaugh, whose real radio audience is about 2.2 million, and whose employer, Clear Channel, lost $3.7 billion in the second quarter of this year. I said, when are you gonna wake up? These are kooks. And Cheney is the kook leader. But [Nancy] Pelosi and [Harry] Reid are such feckless leaders they haven't got any spine. We have no leadership in the legislative branch on either side of the aisle . . .

I become exasperated. There's just no courage, there's no moral courage whatsoever in the Democratic Party.

Nope. Just a bunch of timid and tone-deaf parochialists who seem absolutely determined to revert to a Congressional minority as soon as they possibly can.

---Vitelius