On July 31st Speaker Pelosi and her husband, Paul, had a private dinner at the White House with President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.
According to MSNBC, Speaker Pelosi and President Bush had a private session before the family dinner. What agreements did they make? (Oh, and was Dick Cheney present?)
Let us consider the accumulating evidence below the break.
Within five days of the dinner, Speaker Pelosi had meekly caved on the "Protect America Act," which gives broad powers to Attorney General Gonzales and to Director of National Intelligence McConnell to conduct wireless wiretapping (and likely warrantless datamining and perhaps warrantless data retrieval as well), even on Americans. The White House received from Congress the green light to shred, bag, and incinerate the Fourth Amendment.
Within two weeks of the White House dinner, Karl Rove announced his resignation on August 13th, effective August 31st. Department of Justice bit player Bradley Schlozman apparently resigned during the same week, though his resignation became public only on August 20th.
Also on August 13th, we learned from Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker that President Bush had agreed with Senator Harry Reid not to make any recess appointments if in return Reid would agree to move forward some of Bush's appointments when the Senate reconvenes in September. Of course, the question becomes: exactly which appointments? Is one of them the benighted Leslie Southwick, who squeaked out of the Senate Judiciary Committee thanks to the odd "aye" vote of Senator Dianne Feinstein, Speaker Pelosi's fellow San Franciscan?
Are there connections here? Did Speaker Pelosi agree to shred the Fourth Amendment in return for the heads of Karl Rove and one minor leaguer, Bradley Schlozman? Is Pelosi's stated intent to revisit the "Protect America Act" before its six-month sunset provision kicks in really a credible one?
Did Speaker Pelosi carry to the White House dinner a cup of water for Senator Reid in making a deal on the confirmation of Bush's appointments after the summer recess-including ensuring that Senator Feinstein voted for Southwick to move his nomination out of committee?
In that "private" session on July 31st did President Bush make any direct threats to Speaker Pelosi in order to soften her up for these agreements? Speaker Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, is a wealthy investor with substantial real estate and stock holdings. Did the White House Swift Boat machine go into action to threaten Pelosi in some way, perhaps through her husband's business dealings (and much of the property is jointly held)? After all, with warrantless wiretapping and datamining, it should not be that difficult to build up an interesting J. Edgar Hoover-like dossier on a political enemy-and then threaten to embellish the potentially juicy parts as necessary for public consumption.
Far-fetched, you say? But is this not their bare-knuckled, authoritarian pattern? Is this not how the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Addington/Gonzales "unitary executive" Administration has consistently conducted its hyper-partisan business--backed by exhaustive Rovian "opposition research?"
Was shredding the Fourth Amendment in return for the heads of Rove and a minor leaguer really a good political bargain? (In any case, Rove now has the free time to saturate the talk shows and op-ed pages with White House agitprop. It might be a net gain for the White House for Rove to leave the office and hit the propaganda circuit.)
Was having an uninterrupted summer vacation really a good trade in return for the eventual appointment of yet another reliably corporatist judge such as Leslie Southwick, with perhaps dozens of ideologically reliable apparatchiks like him soon to follow?
Did Speaker Pelosi agree with Bush to any other trades which have not yet been announced, as in those baseball deals involving "a player and other considerations to be named later?" Did Pelosi and Bush cut a deal on the future of the "surge" in Iraq? How about air strikes on Iran?
By this point, any sentient team owner with an interest in pursuing a winning season would have fired a general manager for exercising poor judgment in making deals.
The above line of argument is highly speculative, but if it happens to be tethered to what really happened in that "private" session at the White House on July 31st, it would seem that Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid need one of two things:
(1) some guidance in how to deal with delusional sociopaths and serial abusers (i.e., Bush and Cheney)
or
(2) major emergency back surgery to implant supporting stainless steel rods along their spines.