I realize taking political advice from Mark Penn is like taking advice on interviews from, you know, Caroline Kennedy, but Penn tosses out a suggestion: Nancy Pelosi should “shut the door” on the “CIA lied” tale. Hmmm. How does she do that, exactly? Well, I suppose she could say, “I made a mistake; I was told about waterboarding.” But that’s not really an option if she wants to preserve the patina of political respectability. I guess she could say again what she did on Friday which is, in effect: “Well, when I said the CIA lied, I didn’t mean the CIA was lying. I meant Bush lied.” So far that hasn’t flown and Republicans, the Sunday talk shows, the mainstream media and, come to think of it, Mark Penn are all still buzzing about it.

So long as Pelosi is Speaker and so long as Democrats are buzzing about a Truth Commission and the punishment of Bush administration officials it will be hard to close the door on this one. But I hand it to Penn — it’s a better idea (albeit with no plan to execute) than “run Hillary as the experience candidate in a change election year.”