Cashel BoyloThe First Lady may well have caught the President in a comprosing situation with the Secretary of State, but that cannot be the reaason fro her decamping the marital home in the White House for a room in the Mayflower Hotel.
Women who marry into wealth and power know very well what they are getting into and they understand it is not sweet romance and fidelity.
This must be even more clear when they knowingly marry a lying, drunken, coke-snorting, duty-dodging, closet homosexual.
Such marriages have not been all that unusual amongst America's ruling families over the past two hundred years.
The common prototype for this sort of union calls only for the production of at least one offspring, lots of "happily married couple" photo-ops and dutiful wifely public support. Outside of those items, the marriage often doesn't really exist.
Bush is now facing the possibility of censure, even a charge of criminal conspiracy over his order to Scooter Libby to blow the cover of a serving undercover CIA operative. Moves toward impeachment are growing all over.
Quite trivial -- and so most dangerous -- the outing of Gay George has started with some blunt statements from alleged eyewitnesses and co-participants. There must surely be many more such bombshells in the works.
Laura is simply ostentatiously distancing herself from the looming disaster.
Her unnecessarily very public move to the Mayflower (she could easily have retired to Crawford, visited troops overseas etc etc...) is part of a process that started at least a year ago.
Her public appearances with Bush have diminished markedly in number and importance.
Her appearance at a fund raiser for maverick Republican Chaffey is part of the disconnection process.
Chaffey opposes Bush on Iraq, tax cuts, Social Security and drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
Laura's endorsement of Chaffey can hardly have helped him all that much with conservative Republicans -- and he doesn't seem to need much help with anybody else.
However, it sure helped Laura to pose as her own woman, distant from the impending wreck in the White House, leaving George alone to deal with threatening censure, impeachment, outing...