I find it painful to watch House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defend herself. It’s not that I don’t believe that the CIA failed to brief her about waterboarding terrorist suspects. I do, especially now that former Senator Bob Graham has demonstrated that he was no where in the room three of the four times the CIA claimed it briefed him. And he has no memory of discussing waterboarding in the one top-secret hearing he attended (no notes allowed, all aides excluded.)

It’s a nasty business we’ve been involved with since 9/11, and the further we get from that horrific event, the clearer it is that our government behaved badly

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, supposedly on our behalf, without furthering our security. The Obama Administration is caught between supporting the CIA, on which it relies for intelligence about our evolving world, and the Speaker of the House, who gave the president political support early and effectively.

I’ve always thought that Pelosi made a dreadful mistake when she announced that she was taking impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney “off the table” for consideration in the House of Representatives, where impeachment must begin. I’m sure she envisioned it as a gutsy move, to say, Folks we have more important business to address here, and I’m not going to waste our time on finger-pointing.

Friends reminded me that the Democrats didn’t have the Senate votes to convict anybody if the House did impeach Bush and Cheney. But, remembering Watergate and the Clinton impeachment, I believed that there were honorable people in the Senate who might have voted on principle if the facts were established. At least we should have given them the opportunity.

What effective politician you know would willingly and publicly lay her largest weapon on the table and not demand something extra extra large in return? Even if she knew that impeachment was a distant prospect, it was unwise to signal that she would not hold the White House accountable, no matter how grave the offense.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry watching Republican House Leader John Boehner say about Pelosi at a recent news conference, “The question is what did she know and when did she know it?” Who suggested that old Watergate line? Was he trying to signal that Pelosi, like former president Richard Nixon, was going to be forced out? Or was he saying the Republicans can’t forget the last public shaming over matters with any serious political import?

Which brings us to former Vice President Cheney, the irrepressible old Nixon hand. There he’s been all over television proclaiming that he must speak out in opposition to the new president’s negligence over our security. Of course, no one ever went broke counting on our nation-wide willingness to forget our history. Are we not going to demand that Cheney tell us who was paying attention to all the warnings about al-Qaeda passed on by the Clinton Administration, the national security council and, yes, the CIA? You’d think he’d be embarrassed, but instead he keeps repeating that waterboarding is not torture but an effective way of extracting evidence…of what? A person’s willingness to confess anything in order to stop the, uh, unpleasantness? It’s almost as though he’s taunting Democrats to hold him accountable.

So maybe the brouhaha over Pelosi is a ploy to distract us from the debacle of the disintegration of the Bush administration’s many failed policies and from their inability to find any real traction in a post-Bush world. Does anyone sane believe Jeb Bush has the solution to anything?

President Obama has said he’s more focused on going forward than in punishing the sins of the past. He’s not against investigating them, mind you. He just doesn’t want to put his energy there, and perhaps he shouldn’t.

Pelosi and the House may have passed up the one opportunity we had to make a case that the Constitution of the United States was serially breached in the years following the 2001 terrorist attacks, and to hold those most responsible to charges, a trial, and, perhaps, loss of office. The failure to deal with the seriousness of those offenses must haunt Pelosi as Republicans seek to implicate her in those very crimes.

Worse, by ignoring those crimes, we have left ourselves open to the same or worse offenses by this or future administrations. The barn door has opened, and the culprits have walked away. Bush has locked himself into a gated community where even Boy Scouts are expected to meet him in full uniform. Perhaps it’s just as well that Cheney stuck around to remind us of what the world felt like when we were forced to take him seriously.