Well, without a post since last Rule 5 Sunday, I think I’ve got to cram in a few short posts before my next Rule 5 post, lest I become well known for only being able to post Rule 5 posts. I am, after all, thoughtful, smart, incisive, rational, and an excellent writer . . . who’s going to fill his post quote this week by cribbing off a bunch of other folks.

First hat tip goes to Ace for this AP piece on Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to answer questions about her CIA briefings on enhance interrogation:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she won’t talk any more about her charge that the CIA lied in 2002 about using waterboarding on terrorism suspects.

“I have made the statement that I’m going to make on this,” she told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference. “I don’t have anything more to say about it. I stand by my comment.”

Translation: if I keep talking, you’ll just catch me in another lie. So I’m shutting up and leaving things where they stand.

Pelosi reminds me of the plotters in A Simple Plan or the lead character in the AMC series Breaking Bad. The former is a great movie about a couple of friends and brothers in small town who discover a downed plane in the woods loaded with drug money and decide how they’re going to keep it for themselves. In the latter, an under-achieving high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal lung cancer decides to make sure his family is provide for after his death by putting his chemistry skills to use manufacturing methamphetamine. In both cases, the protagonists think to themselves at the outset, What could go wrong? And of course, plenty does, and all of them end up doing evil things, including murder, they never could have imagined doing just weeks before. 

I think that’s what Pelosi figured at the beginning of her denials: What could go wrong? And now she finds herself in a web of lies that requires her to just shut up to avoid digging herself any deeper. As Ace notes (emphasis mine):

Nancy Pelosi stands, now, as a presumed but unproven liar. Given this state of affairs, a truthful woman would want the truth to come out, to vindicate her.

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t. This is, of course, because the truth is against her. So between the two possibilities — having her honesty in doubt vs. having the truth come out — she chooses the best for her.

Any lying politician of course would jump at the chance to have their lies assumed rather than proven. So long as there is a little bit of doubt, they come out ahead, or at least ahead of where they could (and should) be.

While Nancy Pelosi may be uniquely contemptible, she is hardly unique in her lying. But as Ace also notes, the press claims that one of their roles is to ferret out lies, and here, they don’t seem so interested.