Nancy Pelosi scares me

No, really. And I'm talking “catch the first flight to Canada and stay put for four years if she ever gets elected President”-scares me. Heck, I'd be tempted to take a two year hike in the alps if she ever even became Speaker of the House.

Ms. Pelosi has an opinion column in today's Washington Post, railing on President Bush for having the sheer gall to keep a careful eye and ear on foreign terrorists hellbent on destroying America. In this column, the House Minority Leader admits to knowing about the program long before its treasonous leaking to the New York Times:

The executive branch provides notice of some especially sensitive intelligence information only to the chairman and the ranking member of the minority party of the House and Senate intelligence committees, and to the leaders of Congress. This is how I came to be informed of President Bush's authorization for the NSA to conduct certain types of electronic surveillance.

So much for feigning outrage. What she writes next, however, is horrifying:

But when the administration notifies Congress in this manner, it is not seeking approval. There is a clear expectation that the information will be shared with no one, including other members of the intelligence committees. As a result, only a few members of Congress were aware of the president's surveillance program, and they were constrained from discussing it more widely. That limitation must change.

So, to clarify, Ms. Pelosi, in the wake of a top-secret program being leaked to the press and effectively compromising national security, is proposing that top secret programs in the future should be shared with more people? Simply stunning.

The bottom line is that members of Congress have notoriously big mouths. That Ms. Pelosi's column comes in the Washington Post is only further proof of such, but the reality is that we shouldn't be as concerned with signed editorial columns as anonymous background sources who happen to have 534 colleagues competing for good favor in the same national publications.

In fact, I can think of few worse ways to keep a secret than telling members of Congress. But, then again, Ms. Pelosi would clearly be more content with a government that kept no such secrets – one where all plans and operations were completely open for the enemy to see.

I realize that neither the World Trade Center nor the Pentagon happen to be in Ms. Pelosi's district, but you would hope that as a leader in the United States Congress, she might actually have some concern for the well being of American citizens outside of the liberal dystopia of a congressional district she calls home.