Kabuki Backfire

I honestly think the GOP kabuki dance on the Cheney/Pelosi torture issue is about to backfire catastrophically on the Republican party. Not sure how right I am about this, but there's a theory, and it goes like this:

The most likely outcome of the Pelosi side of the story is going to be a full investigation into who knew what when. Pelosi not only didn't pull the Democratic Fetal Position tuck 'n' whimper, but she dared the Republicans to in fact start that investigation they so badly seem to now want. This is bad for the Republicans how, exactly? Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House and a Democrat. How could this possibly be bad for the GOP?

Well, because somebody named Dick can't keep his damn mouth shut, is why. Josh Marshall illuminates us (emphasis mine):

Next you have a flurry of claims that a key motive behind the push to torture was to elicit 'confessions' about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, which was of course the key predicate for the invasion of Iraq. That again has to create much more pressure to clarify what happened. The basis of most of the anti-torture push has been the assumption that torture was used for the purpose of eliciting information about future terrorist attacks. Whether it was illegal, wrong-headed, misguided, immoral -- whatever -- most have been willing to at least give the benefit of the doubt that that was the goal. If the driving force was to gin up new bogus intel about the fabled Iraq-al Qaida link, politically it will put the whole story in a very different light. And rightly so.

In other words, if torture was used to get dubious evidence that Saddam was linked to 9/11 and Al Qaeda that was in turn used to get us into a war with Iraq, and the orders for that inhuman treatment came from Dick Cheney's office, somebody is in a crapload of trouble.

If the investigation that results from Pelosi's statements crosses paths with Cheney's torture factory, then we're going to have ourselves a grand old time. And I think now that the Republicans have gone down the "investigate Pelosi now!" path, the excuse that expanding that investigation to include the Bush White House would somehowbe a "partisan witch hunt" would evaporate. After all, it's Republicans who are now saying "Yes, we need to know exactly what happened in 2002 and 2003!" on the torture front.

Republicans kicked the door open, only to possibly have it bounce back and hit them square in the teeth. Should "Bush lied, our troops died" becomes "Cheney tortured, our troops died" then this thing is going to take on a life of its own.