Nine months after taking control of the House, Nancy Pelosi is taking credit for "changing the debate" on the war while in Iraq there are 30,000 more troops than on the day the San Francisco Democrat first rapped the Speaker's gavel.

Yes, we've certainly changed the debate all right. The debate is now over how much more money will we give to Bush with no strings attached for his surge in Iraq, and whether the leading Democratic Presidential nominees will ever commit to removing all our troops from Iraq.

Hillary Clinton, the leading candidate, reiterated her refusal to commit to a complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq by 2013. Her top contenders, Barack Obama and John Edwards, joined her in declining to speculate on hypothetical situations so far in the future.

That's certainly a big change, all right. We elected Democrats in 2006 to change the course in Iraq, based on their own campaign promises. Who knew that the only change they would effect would be to approve an escalation of the war with no promise to ever bring it to an end? But back to Pelosi and Blitzer:

Pelosi lectured Blitzer, adding condescendingly "for those who pay attention" that she said Democrats will "hold this administration accountable, time and time again for the conduct of this war."

Great news right? Except yesterday the only people we saw the House holding accountable for exercising their constitutional right of free speech daring to criticize Bush's hand picked front man for the escalation in Iraq, General Betrayus Petraeus, was the liberal activist organization, Moveon.org which the House, by a vote of 341 to 79, condemned for their ad in the New York Times that merely informed the public of all the "inaccuracies" in General Petraeus' testimony before Congress.

It seems to me that to hold the President accountable for the war you either have to:

1) Stop funding the war,

or

2) Commence an impeachment investigation into the lies that were used to mislead the Congress and the American public into supporting Bush's invasion of Iraq, an action that violated the UN Charter by prosecuting a war of aggression, and then continuing to occupy that country with thousands of American troops four and a half years later while millions of innocent Iraqis have been killed, maimed, ethnically cleansed or become refugees without a country, all while Bush's campaign contributers make billions off the war.

So is that what Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, has in mind when she speaks of holding President Bush and his administration accountable for their criminal prosecution of this war? Uh, not exactly:

"I've always said that impeachment is off the table," Pelosi said Tuesday at the tail end of an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "This is President Bush's war; it's Vice President Cheney's war, and now it's become the war of the Republicans in Congress."

Pelosi blamed the closely divided Senate for preventing passage of meaningful reforms in the Iraq war strategy and claimed she did not have the political clout or Constitutional authority to unilaterally cut war funding.

So she and the Democrats in Congress will hold Bush accountable, they just won't do anything that would actually hold Bush and Cheney accountable? Unless by accountability she means pointing the finger at the Republicans and blaming them for her own failed leadership. Make sense to you? Me neither. Then again, it's probably easier to bash the American people who provided Democrats with their majorities in Congress last Fall, then it is to provide any real accountability for the sins of the Bushies over the last seven years.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed frustration yesterday at the public perception that Democrats in Congress had failed to end the war in Iraq ...

"We have to make it very clear to the American people that it was George Bush's war [but] it is now the Republicans in Congress's war," she said.

The perception among many Americans, she said, is that Democrats, despite leading Congress since January, had failed to make meaningful progress toward ending the war, which they promised to do after winning both chambers of Congress in last fall's elections.

Gee, I wonder how any of us got the perception that the Democrats had rolled over for the Bush administration whenever they have been asked to show some backbone? I'm sure it had nothing to do with this:

Top House Democrats retreated Monday from an attempt to limit President Bush's authority for taking military action against Iran as the leadership concentrated on a looming confrontation with the White House over the Iraq war.

Officials said Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the leadership had decided to strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before moving against Iran.

Or this:

THE DEMOCRATIC-led Congress, more concerned with protecting its political backside than with safeguarding the privacy of American citizens, left town early yesterday after caving in to administration demands that it allow warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens, with scant judicial supervision and no reporting to Congress about how many communications are being intercepted. To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law -- or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions.

And those are just two of numerous examples where the Democratic Leadership in Congress has capitulated to the demands of the Bush administration or the minority Republicans in the House and Senate. I guess in Nancy Pelosi's world abject surrender counts as accountability. Too bad for the rest of us we have to live in that world with her.

PS. For those of you who are interested in actually watching Pelosi's "conversation" with Blitzer, Raw Story has the video here.