Don’t you dare question her patriotism!

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday phoned President Bush to air her complaints over Vice President Dick Cheney’s comments that the Congressional Democrats’ plan for Iraq would “validate the Al Qaeda strategy.”

Pelosi, who said she could not reach the president, said Cheney’s comments wrongly questioned critics’ patriotism and ignored Bush’s call for openness on Iraq strategy.

“You cannot say as the president of the United States, ‘I welcome disagreement in a time of war,’ and then have the vice president of the United States go out of the country and mischaracterize a position of the speaker of the House and in a manner that says that person in that position of authority is acting against the national security of our country,” the speaker said.

Given some of the things Pelosi’s Democrats have said about the President I don’t think she’s got much room to be outraged.

But was it really a mischaracterization?  Here’s what the VP had to say:

“I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the al Qaeda strategy,” the vice president told ABC News. “The Al Qaeda strategy is to break the will of the American people … try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit.”

I’d like Pelosi, or any other liberal out there, to explain to me how the Vice President is wrong.