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Hume: Pelosi’s Iraq Position May Put Her ‘At Odds With Her Own Majority’

Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume said that incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) “has expressed a view on the war which is identical to Murtha’s,” which Hume described as, “basically, she wants to get out and she doesn’t seem to care particularly about what the consequences are in Iraq and the aftermath.” Hume said that such a position “will put her perhaps even at odds with her own majority.” Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/11/humenp.320.240.flv]

Virtually all of Hume’s charges are wrong. Pelosi isn’t likely to face problems from her caucus over her Iraq position. As ThinkProgress has noted, the majority of House Democrats in the outgoing 109th Congress — 105 of 202 — not only agree with Murtha’s position, but have cosponsored Murtha’s resolution calling for our troops to be “redeployed at the earliest practicable date” out of Iraq. In the 110th Congress, the number is likely to be even higher because many successful candidates called for redeployment during the campaign.

Also, Pelosi’s support for redeployment doesn’t demonstrate a lack of concern for stability in the Middle East. To the contrary, Pelosi has repeatedly said that she favors redeployment specifically because that strategy will make the “region more stable,” in addition to strengthening our military and improving our anti-terrorism posture. (See details in our Strategic Redeployment plan.)

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Full transcript:

WALLACE: Brit, what does this tell us about Pelosi and what does this tell us about her strength in the new Congress?

HUME: Well, I think it’s a little early to tell from this, but it looks on the surface like sort of an unforced error. At first, it was thought, you know, that she had such a relationship with Jack Murtha that she was going to personally back him, but that would be all there was to it. It would just be an expression of a view and that she would recognize Hoyer was going to win and she wasn’t going to go all out. Well, it’s not true that she went all out, but an awful lot of work was done in her direction to try and swing this for Murtha, and it failed utterly. He was beaten, what, 149 to 86, or something like that. That’s a major defeat. The other thing about it is that she has expressed a view on the war which is identical to Murtha’s, and basically, she wants to get out and she doesn’t seem to care particularly about what the consequences are in Iraq and the aftermath. I’m not sure that’s a position that a lot of Americans would support, but I think that’s where she is, and if that’s the case, of course, we’re likely to see more such actions on her part that will put her perhaps even at odds with her own majority.