First 100 hours, good. After that, not so much.

Having accomplished her 100 hour program, Nancy Pelosi is now gunning straight for President Bush, ratcheting up the rhetoric Thursday.

In response to the plan to deploy about 20,000 more troops to Iraq, Pelosi told ABC's Good Morning America: "the president knows that because the troops are in harm's way, that we won't cut off the resources. That's why he's moving so quickly to put them in harm's way."

My question is: does America really need this?

The suggestion that Bush is simply callous about the deaths of American soldiers seems pretty disgusting to me. Leaving aside all the arguments for and against being in Iraq in the first place and the deep split over what to do now, an attempt to divide the country even further is rather counterproductive.

Hillary Clinton was at it, too, saying that the US put the Iraqi government in power. That's funny, because I thought I saw hundreds of pictures of Iraqis lining up to vote for their government representatives. And, I also seem to remember months of Iraqi wrangling afterwards over exactly how the government should look. Oddly, I didn't see any Americans voting for Iraqi leaders or standing over them forcing them to make parliamentary decisions. If they had, I don't think making al-Sadr a major component of the government would have been the first choice.

The Democrats were actually getting off to a pretty good start with their legislative program. As discussed before, I'm totally in favour of funding stem cell research and I thought raising the minimum wage and the decision to increase security checks on incoming cargo were sensible.

But, as it always seems to lately, it comes down to nastiness expressed through the media. And, that isn't sensible at all.

The Democrats have a chance for two years to show the US public exactly how they're different than the Republicans in a positive way. They need to put forth ideas, not rhetoric.

100 hours of good sense followed by two years of schoolyard behaviour isn't going to cut it.