Everything old is new again

Here’s the story:

Neville Chamberlain, on a visit to German, said on Wednesday Adolph Hitler was ready to hold peace talks with the Jews.

Okay, I lied.  That’s not the story.  This is the story, with the Jews instantly and credibly (given actual events, not propaganda) exposing the lying liars and the lies they tell:

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on a visit to Syria opposed by the White House, said on Wednesday President Bashar al-Assad was ready to hold peace talks with Israel.

But her remark that Israel was prepared to negotiate with Damascus prompted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office to underline the Jewish state’s preconditions for such talks.

Democrat Pelosi is the most senior U.S. official to visit Syria in more than two years. The White House called her trip to Damascus a bad idea and Republican President George W. Bush said it sent mixed signals to Syria.

“We were very pleased with the reassurances we received from the president (Assad) that he was ready to resume the peace process. He was ready to engage in negotiations (for) peace with Israel,” Pelosi said.

“(Our) meeting with the president enabled us to communicate a message from prime minister Olmert that Israel was ready to engage in peace talks as well,” Pelosi told reporters after talks with Assad.

An Israeli government official said that was not the message Olmert had asked Pelosi earlier this week to convey to Assad, who seeks the return of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

“The prime minister said Israel is interested in peace with Syria, but Syria would first have to abandon the path of terror and providing support for terrorist groups,” the official said, in reference to Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

I truly cannot tell if Pelosi is stupid, credulous, vicious, rendered incapable of thought by Bush Derangement Syndrome, or all of the above.  It’s bad enough for the head of the House to go against the Executive Office in meeting with terrorists (and apparently discussing more than mosques and marketing).  It’s heinous when she becomes a mouthpiece for their lies. 

I’d like to be a nice person and say that Pelosi is an innocent, in denial as Chamberlain was, but she doesn’t have that excuse.  First, unlike Chamberlain, who had the authority to negotiate with Germany, she shouldn’t be there in the first place. (Others have made this point, with all its ramifications, so I’ll just stop here.) Second, Chamberlain didn’t have himself as an example of the idiocy of believing the smiling faces of killer governments.  Pelosi has moved herself in my mind from Democratic irritant to genuine bad actor.