Regarding what is humorously referred to as "The Don Imus and Nancy Pelosi Show" -- two concurrent flaps involving the characterization of women -- in an interesting essay from The Globalist:

..."The Imus saga is as deplorable as it is over-covered by now. The man belongs into a corner of the museum of radio history, like an old and tired and outdated steam engine past its last economically useful puff.

While ostensibly clad in pure foreign policy reasons, Republican criticisms of Speaker Pelosi are soaked with sex-based type-casting.



The more interesting saga concerns Nancy Pelosi, a woman who rose all the way from sitting at her father's lap in her days as a young girl (when he served as mayor of Baltimore, then a significant U.S. city) to Speaker of the House — in her own right and not on any quasi-inherited track.


Outwardly, her critics describe the outing to Damascus where she sat down to talk with Bashar Assad to discuss bilateral issues alternatively as an act of impertinence, amateurism — and, yes, treason.


Going where no woman has gone before


As those fierce critics have it, she was stabbing the sitting President of the United States in the back. She was undermining his chosen course of foreign policy.


After all, legend has it, the debate over the course of U.S. foreign policy stops at the water's edge. Once abroad, all U.S. policymakers are supposed to sing from the same songbook — lest they risk misrepresenting the United States.


Representing the people


The doctrine about the water's edge is not part of the world of a modern democracy. Rather, it is part and parcel of a constitutional monarchy. And that is the real debate worth having soon.


Trouble is, Speaker Pelosi was hardly claiming to represent the President of the United States. But she certainly represents the majority of the American people — and, as her luck would have it given the report of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, U.S. elites.


The latter had argued in favor of a foreign policy strategy stressing dialogues — rather than empty, or desperate, threats of bombs.


Certainly, for an administration such as Mr. Bush's, it is curious to want to muzzle the Speaker of the primary U.S. parliamentary body at a time when the Bush team so ardently fervors bringing democracy and the right to free political speech to the oppressed peoples of the Middle East.


Going against Pelosi


It is no less surprising to read those same arguments muzzling — if not mugging — Speaker Pelosi on the very editorial pages which have stood with Mr. Bush's grand designs all along.


Truth be told, Mrs. Pelosi may not be the greatest of all diplomats — but it is surely disgraceful to the image and ideals of the United States to treat her in such a high-handed way.


Bad foreign policy


Pelosi was hardly claiming to represent the President of the United States. But she certainly represents the majority of the American people.


After all, most Americans — not to mention the rest of the world — by now believes that President Bush's and Vice President Cheney's foreign policy has been an outright fiasco.


At such a pivotal moment in time, it is key for the American people to show to the outside world in a hands-on fashion that there is a diversity of opinion at home.


And given the fact that Mr. Bush and his entire team are showing themselves completely inflexible and unwilling to talk with Syria, there is no law or rule that makes this disdainful course wise "...