Speaker Nancy Pelosi was speaking to reporters yesterday, seemingly in a good mood until someone asked her about the anger of the Democratic base over her failure to end the war in Iraq. You know the war, the one that was President Bush’s but is now the war of the Republicans in Congress:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in a determinedly good mood when she sat down to lunch with reporters yesterday. She entered the room beaming and, over the course of an hour, smiled no fewer than 31 times and got off at least 23 laughs.

But her spirits soured instantly when somebody asked about the anger of the Democratic “base” over her failure to end the war in Iraq.

“Look,” she said, the chicken breast on her plate untouched. “I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things — Buddhas? I don’t know what they were — couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk.”

Unsmilingly, she continued: “If they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have ‘Impeach Bush’ across their chest, it’s the First Amendment.” …

…”We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow,” Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor. Though crediting activists for their “passion,” Pelosi called it “a waste of time” for them to target Democrats. “They are advocates,” she said. “We are leaders.”

It was a rather fierce response to the party’s liberal base, which frightens many a congressional Democrat. But it wasn’t out of character for the new speaker. Pelosi’s fixed and constant smile makes her appear as if she is cutting an ad for a whitening toothpaste. But when you listen to the words that come from her grinning maw, the smile seems more akin to that of a barracuda.

Seems it’s a testy topic for the woman who once declared there was a new Congress in town. Who knew?

Ever since the new Democratic Congress was sworn in in January we have seen numerous futile votes to set a date certain for withdrawing from Iraq.

Apparently the Democrats in charge have finally seen the light and decided maybe they had better get to work on a domestic agenda because if they pin their hopes on us losing in Iraq those hopes are dimming.

“Iraq has always been the 800-pound gorilla in the room, but there are other issues to deal with,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “We did well with our initial agenda. Now we need to move on to a broader agenda.”

But there’s another driving factor under the radar: a latent concern that Iraq may not be as favorable a political issue for Democrats a year from now, as images of brigades of U.S. troops coming home could well be flickering on American television screens.

“They’ve run millions of dollars of ads and had untold rallies and protests, but they’re actually losing approval” on the war, said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “How’s it going to look when troops start coming home next year and, while most people are holding a ‘Welcome Home’ sign, they’re left holding a MoveOn.org ad or Code Pink banner?”

Of course I still have a problem with their domestic agenda.

They are going on about the SCHIP program as though President Bush cut the program and wants all children to not have insurance.

In fact, President Bush had an increase in his budget request for SCHIP, but no one in their right minds would think of a 25 year old as a child. No one, that is, except the Democratic party.

They want to fix health care. Fixing health care by nationalizing it is no fix. Subsidizing families that make over $80,000 per year by allowing their children free health care is not fixing health care. It’s socialism at its best, at least in the first stages.

My daughter is a teacher and says “No Child Left Behind” is a sorry program from her viewpoint. I don’t know anything about it except my grandchildren in Texas were in an underperforming school and were given the opportunity to transfer to a different school where they are both flourishing.

I think my daughter is complaining about all the t’s that have to be crossed and all the i’s that have to be dotted.

This was a bill President Bush asked Sen. Ted Kennedy to write, and yet the Democrats are unhappy with it.

If a child is in a failing school then let him go to another school where he can do better and let the failing school come up to standard or be closed and the teachers and administrators put in line to find a new job.

It’s strange that so many of the citizens of Washington DC want voucher choices for their children. Why would they want that if the schools were meeting expectations and why won’t Congress approve school vouchers? The teachers’ unions. That’s the answer plain and simple.

The Democratic leaders want to have negotiations to improve our energy program. We have some energy right now below the tundra in Alaska. It is on isolated land and can be gotten without harming the environment, but no one wants to touch ANWR because they have convinced themselves it will ruin the environment.

As pointed out in the Republican debate Tuesday, we haven’t had a new nuclear facility built in over thirty years and no new refineries built in over ten years.

One of the candidates mentioned liquefying coal and using it as a resource. We can’t depend totally on ethanol and the good graces of the oil producing nations or we’ll all be huddled in caves, burning what logs we can find to cook our food and keep warm.

There are plenty of things Congress can fix if they don’t care who gets the credit. It’s way past time for politics and way past time for bipartisan efforts to improve the future of our country.

In his latest dispatch, Michael Yon writes of some of the sacrifices of war. It became obvious to me in reading this piece that Michael was very connected to not only the members of the military with whom he has served as an embed, but to his own emotions as he experiences not only the successes but the horrors of war.

We glided down through the German night, where a large group of staff waited on the tarmac to load the patients into buses. During the bus ride to the hospital, electronic monitors beeped, IVs dripped, and the patients’ litters were jostled by the road. The ambulatory among us steadied the patients, to protect them from further pain.

Another strong offering from Mr. Yon. A bit of an emotional roller coaster ride in many ways for the reader but in the end as always, the story as it really is.