A little treat for the Iraq hawks in the HA readership, who were lectured for years by party hacks like this that patrolling the circle of civilized behavior isn’t a good enough reason to go chasing every Baathist lunatic who’s armed to the teeth with poison gas. Consider it a video complement to the chart from Business Insider that’s making the rounds today. Nothing new here — glaring partisan shifts on counterterrorism have been showing up in polls since the start of O’s first term — but this one’s unusually elegant:

Here’s Nancy recalling a chat she had with her five-year-old grandson, whom we’ll call “Pelosi 2002.” Pelosi 2002 couldn’t understand how intervening in a chaotic sectarian bloodletting with fanatics on all sides is in America’s national interest. Simple, said Pelosi 2013: The head fanatic is killing children with gas. “Didn’t Saddam do that to Kurdish children?” asked Pelosi 2002, his big brown eyes wide with confusion. No no, kidding — I like to imagine that he thought that, but kept quiet out of respect for his elders. Anyway, let’s not be unfair to Pelosi: The truth is, she’s been an egregious partisan on counterterror and national security for ages. She looked the other way at waterboarding after 9/11, then strenuously denied it years later when waterboarding had become The Worst Atrocity Ever. (Even worse than summary execution via drone strike!) Then, after Obama took office, she decided drone strikes against American citizens were no biggie. Then, just six weeks ago, she went to bat for O in helping to defeat Amash’s “defund the NSA” amendment in the House, which would have been the screechiest leftist cause celebre evah if the NSA revelations had happened on a Republican president’s watch. And now here she is going past where even George Bush was willing to go by seemingly endorsing war (limited war, with correspondingly limited effect) for purely moral means. Perfection.

All that said, and notwithstanding her previous attempts at rapprochement with the butcher of Damascus, she’s not the biggest Democratic hack in all this. That would be John Kerry, Assad’s most dogged suitor in the U.S. Senate until recently, who’s apparently repudiated the central foreign-policy principle of his 2004 presidential campaign by dispensing with the “global test” now that he sees what it amounts to in practice. No topping that.