The quality of mercy is never strained, quoth the Bard, and although Avon has but seldom come calling for Nancy Pelosi, it behooved her to reach across the aisle with a magnanimous flourish of clemency to declare: “I will not impeach.” Encoded in which is this phrase: “I’m a peach.”

Now you, dear reader, as a habitual consumer of right-wing propaganda, might be laboring under a series of misapprehensions about the speaker-to-almost-certainly-be-as-any-literate-person-who-can-read-a-newspaper-should-know-by-now-unless-they-have-been-hiding-under-a-rock-the-size-of-Gibraltar. You may think of her as a shrill shrew who has nothing but disdain for this country, its mores, its Constitution, and its armed forces. From your parochial perspective you might be nauseated by her vote to allow a child to be killed after its head has emerged from the birth canal alive. Or by her political affiliation with advocates of pedophilia. But you forget one thing which Lesley Stahl hastened to remind you on 60 Minutes this past Sunday: Nancy Pelosi is first and foremost a mother and a grandmother.

That is an odd qualification to advance on behalf of a woman who represents San Francisco, a locality whose cultural patterns have caused the population of children to decline so rapidly that its schools are suffering annual shrinkages in enrollment. There is no need to worry about children being left behind in the classroom when they have already been left behind in the abortionist’s trash bin. (I withdraw that baseless canard; these days they sell the offed offspring for parts.)

Perhaps Ms. Stahl is right. After all, the 60 Minutes team of Morley Safer and Lesley Stahl is Mor or Les accurate. Grandma Nancy may well be the perfect leader for our coarsened time, delivering the milk of human kindness along with the cookies of modern technology. She will insist that our soldiers not go out in the cold of warfare without the sweater of diplomacy. Those little bootees she knits are very helpful in a quagmire.

The Stahl-Pelosi interview progressed from the treacly to the slimy. Although it was the fluffiest of puff pieces, their klatsch was not bereft of substance, because the vulpine Democrat impulse brings out their huffiness alongside their puffiness. This very concrete opinion emerged from the fray. Pelosi explained, in a patronizing (or grand-matronizing?) voice usually reserved for teaching Little Susie not to pick her nose, that if we were to pull our troops out of Iraq the terrorists would leave too — “they’ll stay there as long as we’re there.”

Whuh? Did she really just say that?

Yes, she did, and we should be grateful. Somehow the truth manages to shine through the shield of murk. Not to exaggerate overmuch, let me just say this: in my thirty-odd years of following politics and policy (too) closely, that was the single most idiotic analysis ever offered by a person of real power. It is approached only by Gerald Ford saying in the 1976 Presidential debate that the Soviet Union did not control Eastern Europe — and that was a blurt under pressure, than which he presumably knew better.

For her statement to be true and meaningful, she must believe a series of absurd premises. 1) The terrorists had no interest in, or support from, Iraq in the first place, despite Zarqawi being in position before our arrival. 2) They came to Iraq only because we attacked Iraq and they feel duty-bound to defend its sovereignty. 3) If we leave, they have no motivation to stay there and build a tactical base of operations. 4) If we go home, they will not follow us to attack the homeland.

The diagnosis is clear. Grandma is dotty, potty, dippy, tipsy, loony and moony. She lives in an alternate reality, a Romper Room of the soul, a Woodstock of the mind, a Kumbaya of the heart. In this world, all of humankind is within an ace of mutual understanding and bucolic coexistence, barred only by a few bellicose Republicans stuck in a cold-war time warp. If only Pelosi and her compeers were in charge, the world’s citizens — with the possible exception of Catholics — could convene in San Francisco to consecrate the marriage of all humanity, a marriage that would be happy and… gay.

One of those apocryphal cutesy Reader’s Digest type stories tells of a child who was asked where his grandmother lives. “In the airport,” he replies. “Every time we want to see her, we go there and pick her up.” There is a reason why Nancy Pelosi lives in the airport, it’s because she is most comfortable with her head in the clouds. Let her fly first-class to anywhere but Washington at taxpayer expense, I say: that would be just peachy keen.