Mere Rhetoric: Oh For Crying Out Loud. Democrats Now Actually Meeting With the Muslim Brotherhood. (UPDATED AND BUMPED- Hoyer Denies It. Kind Of. Except Not Really)

Update:
Meryl just gave us the heads up that Hoyer is denying personal meetings with MB members. We're skeptical. His excuse is that he only met with MB members while they were with other non-MB parliamentary members, in a large parliamentary bloc. Mohammed Saad el-Katatni, leader of the Brotherhood's parliamentary bloc, disagrees and continues to insist there were two meetings - a collective one and a personal one. This seems eerily familiar to what happened at the end of last year with the secret Democrat-Hamas meetings: (1) Hamas had the bad taste to let it leak that Democrats undermined US foreign policy and Israeli security by meeting with arch-terrorists (2) the Democrats denied it (3) Hamas continued to insist that it was true. It doesn't make sense for Hamas and the MB to make up fantasy meetings - in the abstract it does because it boosts their credibility, but if they're wrong then presumably the Democrats know it and will avoid them in the future. Plus, some intrepid reporter (especially in Egypt) would have no problem saying "umm... the time you say you were in that meeting with that important Democrat, you weren't". So given the choice between believing that the leader of MB's parliamentary bloc made up times and places out of whole cloth or believing that a powerful Democrat would meet with a terrorist the administration prefer he not meet with...

Original (08:56 PST):
Will you Democratic voters please get a hold of your goddamn party?

A top U.S. Democratic congressman met a leader of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's most powerful rival, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, U.S. officials and the Islamist group said Saturday. Visiting House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer met with the head of the Muslim Brotherhood's parliamentary bloc, Mohammed Saad el-Katatni, twice on Thursday - once at the parliament building and then at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, said Brotherhood spokesman Hamdi Hassan.

This is like some kind of Passover education tour for the House Democratic leadership. They heard that on Passover Jews say "in every generation men rise against us to destroy us", but they didn't believe it. So they all got together and divided up all of the countries and organizations that are explicitly dedicated to wiping out Jews, and decided to grant them high-level diplomatic visits meant to radically undermine US foreign policy in the region.

You know, maybe the reason that 75-85 percent of American Jews stay in the Democratic Party is because they can influence policy. If so, we'd welcome news of a single positive effect they've had. Because in the meantime: