Mr. Rogers goes to Damascus.

In arguing that "perhaps" it's time to apply the criminal sanctions provided for in the Logan Act to Democrat Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Robert F. Turner says this about her:

She is certainly not the first member of Congress -- of either party -- to engage in this sort of behavior, but her position as a national leader, the wartime circumstances, the opposition to the trip from the White House, and the character of the regime she has chosen to approach make her behavior particularly inappropriate.

[Under the Logan Act, Congressmen can engage in fact finding, or even negotiation if authorized.] Ms. Pelosi's trip was not authorized, and Syria is one of the world's leading sponsors of international terrorism. It has almost certainly been involved in numerous attacks that have claimed the lives of American military personnel from Beirut to Baghdad.

The time to draw the line on this kind of credulous supplication was before Ms. Pelosi departed on The Road to Damascus. Were the President to chastise her with a prosecution under the Logan Act, she could justifiably claim that she was sandbagged, though that would hardly amount to a legal defense. Politically, it would be point Pelosi.

There are, however, substantive objections in addition to the ones lodged by Mr. Turner.

"We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace," proclaimed the Speaker. Would that she could be prosecuted for uttering fatuous sediments in public. It must have been something in the humus.

The last famous person to travel The Road to Damascus whom we know of had the scales fall from his eyes as to certain important truths. Alas, that did not happen to Speaker Pelosi. Her operating assumptions apparently remain these:

• The only qualification a U.S. legislator needs in order to approach a foreign leader is that inside her skull an MRI can detect hope and a willingness to be friends.
• President Bush has nothing in his skull, or, if not nothing, neither the aforementioned hope nor the aforementioned friendliness.
• Syrian sponsorship of terror means nothing.
• Syrian-sponsored killings of U.S. servicemen means nothing.
• Syria's current job description of towel boy for the Iranians means nothing.
• The only thing that prevents President Assad from being a nice man is that President Bush and his lackeys have inexplicably not been nice to him.

The naivete of this approach is depressing. On the part of the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, no less, and, presumably, her Democrat Party advisers. As speakers in AA meetings often like to relate, "I ended up face down in the gutter with no family and no job . . . and my best thinking got me there.

Well, we can hardly wait for her trips to Teheran and Pyongyang. And getting the Saudis to abandon their efforts to spread Wahhabism in Cleveland, Memphis, and Soledad must surely be on her agenda. Then there's the Chavez problem to take care of. And that aggressive Chinese military buildup. The spoilsport Muslims in Europe scheming to Islamicize Europe and turn it into a third world cess pool will also need to be approached with hope and friendship.

Those are, respectively: the Road to Pyongyang, the Road to Teheran, the Road to Riyadh, the Road to Caracas, the Road to Beijing, the Road to Brussles, the Road to Paris, the Road to Stockholm, the Road to London, and the Road to Bonn.

All we're missing now are Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour.

"Illegal Diplomacy." By Robert F. Turner, Wall Street Journal Online (subscription), 4/6/07 (emphasis added).