A Cheap Mediterranean Cruise

$200 for a Mediterranean cruise is pretty cheap, but some folks are upset about the cost. Why? That's what the U.S. is required by law to charge Americans who are being evacuated from Lebanon on chartered cruise ships.

Nancy Pelosi, hoping nobody checks her voting record, is calling for the President to waive the charges, but as Special Report points out, it would violate a law that San Fran Nan herself voted for:

Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is calling on the president to immediately declare that the U.S. will start bearing the costs of evacuating its citizens from Lebanon, instead of charging them, saying, "A nation that can provide more than $300 billion for a war in Iraq can provide the money to get its people out of Lebanon."

But the president isn't authorized to reverse the policy — which requires citizens to pay commercial fare plus a dollar for government evacuation — since it's encoded in the 2003 Foreign Relations Authorization Act. That law was approved by the House and the Democratic controlled Senate in 2002. Pelosi herself voted for the measure.

Maybe some of those rich liberal contributors can kick in and cover the cost.

I hate to sound hardhearted, but the United States government was not responsible for those people being in Lebanon in the first place, and they should be grateful that their government will provide them a way out, regardless of the cost.

UPDATE: Some more thoughts on the the evacuation costs. It looks like the U.S. will fold to political pressure and waive the charges, which means waiving the law that authorized them. Maybe next time I get stopped by a cop for a traffic violation I'll just waive the law too.

Some of these folks who are demanding free passage must think that the U.S. owns a fleet of cruise ships that we can dispatch anytime we need them. In fact these ships are being chartered at a HUGE cost. The insurance alone for sailing into a war zone will be in the millions of dollars per ship.

And what's the risk? We know that Hezbollah hates America about as much as it hates Israel. What if one of the terrorist weenies decides to strike America without even leaving his hovel in Lebanon by pointing one of those Iranian anti-ship missiles at a cruise ship full of American citizens? The death toll would be in the hundreds, and you'd probably lose the ship too since they are not armored or equipped for battle like a warship.

Don't think that thought hasn't crossed by minds of the bad guys.