Can Pelosi Break Glass Ceiling?

RUSH: Now, Pelosi, Speaker of the House, called the CIA liars and it did not make the front page. If the CIA is lying, that’s big news, banner headline news. Are the Drive-Bys going to the CIA, ‘Did you lie?’ You know, Pelosi’s finding out what it’s like to be me every day. That press conference yesterday? The media is finally probing; the media finally asking for clarification; the media following up. The Democrats get such softball treatment that when they get a true boring question-and-answer session from the media, they don’t know how to handle it. She was flustered as all get out (interruption) what was that? She was shaking! Well, that could be Botox withdrawal. I don’t want to be too hard on the shaking. I don’t want to do that. But we are about to learn, folks — (interruption) I know, the Drive-Bys never ask me for clarification. But still they bored in on her, Snerdley, and she was walking out, she was walking out sideways, like a crab at the end of the press conference and a reporterette shouted, ‘I have one more question, one more question, do you have time for one more?’ Pelosi, you know, crabbed back to the podium and that’s when it all started again.

These people, they couldn’t last one day with the scrutiny I get. They would not be able to bear up under it. I dare say that very few of any of my media or otherwise liberal critics could bear up under what all of us on the right get each and every day. But we are going to learn soon, folks, if women are the equal of men. We are going to learn very soon if women can finally break the glass ceiling. And you know what the test is? Let me tell you what the test is. Will Nancy Pelosi resign as Speaker of the House? That’s the test. Come on now, we’ve had two men resign, maybe even three. We’ve had Fort Worthless Jim Wright resign as Speaker; we had Mr. Newt resign as Speaker; we had Bob Livingston resign as Speaker-elect before he became Speaker. So if women really want equal treatment, if they really want to crash through that glass ceiling, there is no better benchmark than Nancy Pelosi taking herself and her place right alongside two men who resigned, Fort Worthless Jim Wright and Mr. Newt. That will be the test.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Hot off the presses from The Hill, Capitol Hill newspaper, and I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. It does. ‘After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claim that she was lied to by the CIA sparked a firestorm in Washington yesterday, the CIA director, Leon Panetta, pushed back today, saying, ‘Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.’ Pelosi (D-Calif.) infuriated Republicans this week when she said in a news conference that she was ‘misled’ by CIA officials during a briefing– ‘ By the way, Pelosi is also lying about something else. She is saying that the Jane Harman letter, Jane Harman was on the intel committee. This is the second meeting, this is the February ’03 meeting, or briefing, and Jane Harman was there, and she wrote a letter. And Pelosi said, ‘I didn’t have to object to it because Jane Harman wrote a letter.’ Jane Harman did not object to waterboarding in the letter as Pelosi is claiming that she did.

Jane Harman simply asked the CIA, ‘Has the Bush administration signed off on this?’ But she didn’t say, she didn’t object, Harman didn’t. So Pelosi is really on thin ice. Now, I was talking to some people about this yesterday, and everybody’s talking about how she’s gotta go, this is it, this is it for Pelosi, send her out of there, CIA is going to destroy her. Is anybody, by the way, besides me, a little bothered over the cavalier way that everybody is talking about how the CIA will take care of her? Now, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI and all these secret pictures on politicians to keep ’em in line and threatening and so forth, but just because it’s Pelosi, still, I’m a little queasy over the fact that everybody is just so cavalier, ‘Yeah, CIA, man, you lie about them, they’re going to take care of you and they’ll destroy her.’ I thought, I told somebody yesterday, that perhaps her last best hope is Panetta, because Panetta is a former member of Congress, he is from California, he lives in Monterey, Carmel area, and he runs the CIA. But now that’s off the table because he has fired back today saying it’s up to Congress, meaning it’s up to Pelosi to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what’s going on.

‘Panetta wrote in a memo to CIA employees Friday that ‘CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed,” according to CIA records. ‘We are an agency of high integrity, professionalism and dedication,’ Panetta said in the memo. ‘Our task is to tell it like it is — even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.” This is a memo to CIA people who are being told they’re demoralized now, Pelosi is out there lying about them, saying they lied and so forth. But I thought Panetta would be the last chance she might have to make an end run about this. He’s a Clinton guy, big time, he was Bill’s chief of staff. Isn’t it interesting, now, too, folks, we’re reading everywhere we go, we find out Pelosi is not that popular, even among Democrats. Excuse me, how long have you reporters known that? Some other scandal happened too and the Democrats told us that they were not that popular up there. Oh, it was Biden. You don’t want to get near him, he won’t shut up. If you don’t want to get trampled, don’t show him your camera or microphone and so forth, big mouth, everybody was wondering who they were talking about. It was Biden. It was some years ago, before he was named vice president. But, regardless, now we’re finding out she’s not that popular. That’s what they’re saying.

Well, we know that Steny Hoyer is not her bud. He got the number two spot, even though she lobbied for Jack Murtha to get it. But it looks like everybody’s setting the stage for her to tumble and take a walk on the wild side. How is this going to happen? Are they gonna ask her to resign? Are they going to go in there and doing a Nixon, ‘Hey, you’re hurting the party.’ Rahm Emanuel, Obama, going to say, ‘Hey, you gotta get outta there, we can’t handle this, this is too big a distraction.’ ‘Cause Pelosi has succeeded in making the issue of torture a Democrat issue when the Democrats had succeeded in tying that one around George Bush’s neck. You think she’s gonna go, Snerdley? Okay, Snerdley thinks she will not resign, and she won’t be forced out. I kind of agree. I think the conventional wisdom, you know, I always resist that, I resist the tug of popular sentiment, and it just seems like everybody yesterday, ‘Oh, it was just a matter of time, Pelosi is gone.’ She’s a Democrat and they just don’t throw each other overboard. So, it’s going to be interesting to watch. But people, ‘Oh, yeah, she’ll be gone 30 days, because the Democrats do not want this to become a Valerie Plame thing,’ as that affected Bush, just go on and on, on and on and on, on, on. We’ll see.