In comments on a previous post, 47 Traitors! Biden, Others Rip GOP Senators Over Iran Letter, Marden Seavy introduced the following video clip of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

As Stewart really lays into the Republicans at the beginning of the video, I thought that Mardy had really found the clip to put the nail in the coffin of the Republicans. Unfortunately, I watched the clip to the end. In a seemingly even-handed way, Stewart points out the history of Democrats speaking to foreign leaders at which Republicans and Republican Presidents were annoyed. Jon Stewart has the nasty habit of pointing out the foibles of both sides.

I decided to research one such incident. This was the visit by Nancy Pelosi to Bashar al-Assad of Syria. President Bush was trying to isolate al-Assad at the time.

Of course the devil is in the details of the comparison. The New York Times had an article at the time, Pelosi Meets With Syrian Leader. The article points out the negatives and some possible positives of the trip from various points of view. You’ll really have to read it yourself, and make your own judgment.

I have been reading about the Logan Act of 1799, last amended in 1994. It is not clear if the words WikiPedia gives us are the original act or the act as amended.

The paper Conducting Foreign Relations Without Authority: The Logan Act by the Congressional Research Service settles the matter.

As amended, the Act states:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects

Was Nancy Pelosi trying to defeat some measures of the United States in the same way that the Republicans were? Or is there an actual difference. Now it is up to you to decide if there really is a moral equivalence with what Nancy Pelosi did and what the 47 Republican Senators did.

By the way, the WikiPedia article says:

Despite the apparent success of Logan’s mission, his activities aroused the opposition of the Federalist Party in Congress, who were resentful of the praise showered on Logan by oppositional Democratic-Republican newspapers. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, also of Pennsylvania, responded by suggesting that Congress “act to curb the temerity and impudence of individuals affecting to interfere in public affairs between France and the United States.”

So I come to the conclusion that if you want to do seemingly outrageous things, you can certainly take the risk of doing them (as in starting a war with Iraq under false premises). If you turn out to be right in what you did, you will be deemed a hero. By the same token, if you turn out to be wrong, you will be the goat, and deservedly so. If you end up being the goat, you have no one to blame but yourself.