Posted 5:30 PM by Floyd

Last night I turned to the local all-news radio station (KCBS, 740 AM) at :45 past the hour to get the latest football scores. There were no scores at 8:45 because the station was running an interview. KCBS does a half-hour interview with famous Bay Area people, and airs an interview each Sunday at 8:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. Yesterday the guest was Peninsula congresswoman Anna Eshoo, a Democrat.

Eshoo was certainly well-spoken, but style isn't everything. Listening to the meaning of her words was an object lesson in why it's dangerous to assume that facile public speaking correlates to intelligence. I didn't listen to more than a few minutes, but in that brief time, Eshoo managed to sound like an idiot thrice over.

First, she explained her vote against the Iraq war resolution by saying that the US should take a multilateral approach, as opposed to Bush's unilateral approach.

Eshoo offered no justification as to why the large number of allies possessed by the US -- Qatar, Turkey, many of Afganistan's neighbors, Britain, Australia -- aren't sufficient to make the proposed war multilateral. For the US to derive moral sanction from the approval of the UN Security Council is insane; it means giving veto power to, for example, Syria. Presumably if Eshoo had been around in 1940, she would have told the British that first, it was immoral to resist Hitler unilaterally; second, all operations must be vetted through a random selection of powers including the hostile -- say, Hungary -- and the disinterested -- say, Colombia.

Eshoo also claimed that energy companies had "looted" California, that they had stolen 30 billion dollars in broad daylight. She claimed that the Republicans would not let her investigate. Then she mentioned that California had a 24 billion dollar deficit that was directly attributable to the alleged overcharging. This is ludicrous; the extra money that was supposedly paid to out-of-state energy providers came from customers' pocketbooks, not from the state treasury.

When I first turned on the program I heard Eshoo talking about Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco congresswoman who is the new House Minority leader. Eshoo said that "the opposition" would try to paint Pelosi as a radical. She said that while Pelosi was a liberal and proud of it, she was also a "conservative Catholic." What on Earth does that mean? Is Pelosi opposed to Vatican II, or reform of the priesthood? Is she opposed to gay priests or women priests? Or does she just want her masses in Latin? How dumb do you have to be to not know that conservative Catholics are opposed to abortion?!