Dark Omen Haunts Nancy Pelosi on Return From Iraq

Quick Nancy! Call the witch doctors! Something aint quite right!

Pelosi: No Harm, No Fowl
Washington Post
01/31/2007

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) returned from a four-day trip to Iraq and Afghanistan Monday night to a bizarre, Hitchcock-ian scene -- a beady-eyed, black bird flying around her posh Georgetown apartment.

Were this bird perched upon a bust of Pallas just above her chamber door ("perched, and sat, and nothing more"), then she'd be cool with that. But this simply wasn't Edgar Allan Poe's raven, if it was a raven at all.

No, this was a scene written for Tippi Hedren, though truth be told, it was only one bird ... and oh, OK, it wasn't pecking the Speaker to bits and pieces. But it was scary!

The bird, Pelosi told her colleagues and aides the next day, was flying around, knocking things over as she and an employee of her condo building chased the feathered fiend for an hour.

Finally, according to someone who heard Pelosi's story, they "trapped the bird with a brown bag." Menacing as it was, Pelosi, ever the San Francisco tree-hugger, made an executive decision that the bird should be liberated. So the building staffer, our source reports, "took it outside and released it."

Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said the Speaker described the animal as "a little black bird" and that "she kept thinking to herself, 'Quoth the Raven, 'nevermore.'"

More like, "Get this (blank) bird out of the house, forevermore!"