Pelosi's Syria visit highlights GOP, media hypocrisy

The Right continues to work itself into higher and higher pitches of hysteria over Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria. Today the Wall Street Journal editorial page is shrieking that Pelosi committed a felony by traveling to Syria. The story is that Rep. Pelosi violated the Logan Act.

If in fact Speaker Pelosi violated this Act (which has been on the books in one form or another since the John Adams Administration) then a large part of Congress, living and dead, also violated it. However, the only Logan Act indictment ever occurred in 1803 -- the case involved a Kentucky newspaper that advocated the western states secede from the Union and form a separate nation allied with France -- but no prosecution followed. In all these years not one American has ever been convicted of violating the Logan Act.

One wonders how many Wall Street Journal staffers were put to work finding some obscure law Pelosi might have violated.

[In the video -- upper right, courtesy MMFA -- CNN's Suzanne Malveaux, whom Glenn Greenwald calls "increasingly bizarre" in his excellent post on the media taking its cues from a teensy-weensy group of fringe extremists, carries the right wing water that Barbara details in this post... -- ed]

The Righties have decided that the President has sole authority to talk to foreign governments. But Scott Lilly writes at the Center for American Progress: