Photoshop credit: David Johnson

We had dueling press conferences this morning with Nancy Pelosi accusing the Bush CIA of lying to her about waterboarding and House GOP leader John Boehner defending the integrity of the briefers.

Pelosi had a particularly frozen look on her face throughout her presser as she repeated the “Bush lied about Iraq” mantra to justify her own inaction:

“They mislead us all the time,” she said. And when a reporter asked whether the agency lied, she did not disagree.

She also suggested that the current Republican criticism marked an attempt to divert attention from the Bush administration’s actions.

“They misrepresented every step of the way, and they don’t want that focus on them, so they try to turn the focus on us,” she said.

Projection: It’s what’s for breakfast.

If Pelosi were so incensed about how the CIA misled her, why wasn’t this her response to news of the 2002 briefing a week ago?

Blink, blink.

Pelosi issued a renewed call for a “truth commission.”

Boehner’s response: “Let’s put it all on the table.”

Other Dems (including Harry Reid, who opposes the “truth commission” as, um, a distraction) aren’t happy about where this dangerous blame game might take them.

William Jacobson analyzes the Dems’ lack of a waterboarding exit strategy and concludes:

Here’s my prediction of what will happen if Democrats push the investigation to the bitter end causing damage to national security, a political death match with the CIA, and Democrat-on-Democrat finger pointing:

Steny Hoyer, Speaker; Jane Harman, Majority Leader; Nancy Pelosi, Chair of the House sub-committee on fresh water fisheries; Republicans, unexpected gains in 2010 mid-term elections.

The Democrats wished hard for an investigation into waterboarding and other interrogation methods. They may have wished too hard, because they are about to get what they wished for, with no way out.

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