Administration in a panic as Pelosi does their job by talking to Syria.

Ms. Pelosi, in a telephone interview from Lisbon on Friday, said she could not account for the Bush administration’s assault, which she at one point equated to a tantrum. (She said her children were teasing her about Mr. Cheney’s accusation of bad behavior.) Defending her trip, Ms. Pelosi said that members of Congress had a responsibility to play a role in national security issues and that they needed to be able to gather information on their own, and not be dependent on the White House.

“I am used to the administration; nothing surprises me,” she said. “Having said that, I hope we can have the opportunity to convey to the president what we saw.”

Ms. Pelosi seams to be handling the name calling and Republican attacks with some dignity. And that must be pretty hard with these kinds of statements being directed at her.

“Don’t you get enraged when this kind of thing happens?” Rush Limbaugh asked Mr. Cheney during a radio interview on Thursday.

“I think it is, in fact, bad behavior on her part,” the vice president replied. “She doesn’t represent the administration. The president is the one who conducts foreign policy, not the speaker of the House.”

But the sad fact of this President and his administration is that they do not "conduct foreign policy". They either bully other countries into compliance or they label them evil and just stop talking to them altogether. That is not a negotiation. That is how schoolchildren solve their problems.

The Democrats are trying to repair some of the damage George Bush and his cronies have done to our international relations over the last six and a half years. They have much, much more left to do.