In defense of Pelosi and other alleged Bush enablers

EDIT: Earlier, I briefly attacked Pelosi for enabling Bush's policies, but I rethought it:

A few days ago, Nancy Pelosi called Bush "a total failure" after she criticized House Democrats for not passing a spending bill in twenty-six days.

Now, many of us liberals are thinking, "well, Pelosi enabled Bush's policies, so she has no right to attack him." "Why didn't she block FISA?" we asked a little while ago. "What about cutting off war funding? What about impeachment?"

Pelosi has very liberal personal convictions, but she's very pragmatic. She'd rather go along with something and gain a few concessions than oppose it, lose, gain no concessions, and irritate the conservative wing of her party.

"But what about principles? Why don't Democrats stand up for their principles?" many lamented after the FISA vote, and the 2007 Iraq funding bill. In short, Pelosi and other Democrats would stick to their principles less than they do now if they were stubborn and tried to block every single bad piece of legislation that Bush and McCain try to push through Congress since the resulting legislation would be worse since she, and other Democrats, extract concessions by going along with Bush and McCain.

After the 2006 midterm elections, the Democrats held 233 seats to the Republicans' 202, which means that the GOP needed to flip only 16 Democrats if every Republican toes the party line. They've lost a handful of special elections between 2006 and now so they'd need a couple more, but the forty-nine Blue Dogs, many of whom are flat-out Bush Dogs, are always eager to prove their conservative, anti-San Francisco liberal credentials to their constituents.

The bottom line is that conservative Democrats prevent Pelosi and other moderate and liberal Democrats from defeating the Bush-McCain agenda, so they go along with it and get whatever crumbs they can. But if we hold tight and win this election then we can establish a long-term liberal and communitarian consensus, and finally end the polarization that's plagued the nation since the Vietnam War.