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A lot of blogs have commented on how the Pelosi-Hoyer-Murtha flap has played in the press. In general, Pelosi has taken a lot of flack, been called a "lame duck' and much worse (including botox jokes. I don't usually have time for sexism charges, but somehow I don't imagine if Nancy was Nate, those jokes would have been made.)
Taylor Marsh, for example, takes on Dowd.
Me, I wonder where all these people are coming from. I've been watching Pelosi for a long time, and I liked her back when almost no one in the blogosphere thought she was worth anything. Why? Because I watched how she maneuvered in the caucus, and what I noticed was this - she ran a caucus that went from quite disunited to voting together more than any other Democratic caucus in decades. When Jefferson was found with $90,000 cash in a freezer, she moved to publicly disassociate the Democrats from him. And she had a number of fights with other people in the caucus.
As with this fight, she won some of those fights and she lost some, but she had them. Now if she lost all of them, it'd be a problem, and she would indeed be a joke. But in fact she wins more than she loses. And the fact that she is willing to fight is important. You may have noticed that in Hoyer's victory speech he spent a lot of time saying how committed he was to the goal of getting US troops out of Iraq. That hasn't always been Steny's line - to win he had to assure the caucus that he was good on that issue.
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