Sigfried, Roy and White House Email

Recently, someone reminded me of a classic Chris Rock bit that goes basically like this: People keep saying the tiger went crazy when it attacked Roy, the tiger went CRAZY. No it didn't. The tiger went tiger. The tiger went crazy when it was riding around the ring on a bicycle playing the trumpet.


That pretty much sums up why I've been fairly silent recently on the mendacity and lawlessness of the Bush administration - it's not news when a tiger acts like a tiger. At least it shouldn't be. But when a tiger kills its prey, eats some of it, then sodomizes the lifeless corpse, well that's news.

Let me present then, the White House email scandal, certainly not the most heinous example of White House lawbreaking, but one where the administration definitely is caught sodomizing the barely breathing body of the rule of law:

There is much cause for outrage over the White House's brazen disregard for federal public records law, which may well have resulted in the destruction of millions of official e-mails... The law is clear that e-mails sent and received by anyone in the White House -- just like all official White House documents -- should be instantaneously and automatically archived. So someone in the White House should have been making sure the law was being followed, and that all e-mails were indeed being properly stored for posterity... The matter in the news today relates not to those e-mails, but to as many as several million others -- these actually on the eop.gov accounts -- that seem to have vanished.

Which ones vanished? Why the emails from 2001 to October 2003, a period that just happens to cover the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the Plame leak and the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes. How convenient. But if they are missing, why not just go to the backup tapes?

E-mail messages sent and received by White House personnel during the first three years of the Bush administration were routinely recorded on tapes that were "recycled," the White House's chief information officer said in a court filing this week.

A more clear example of the White House acting with utter disregard (and contempt) for the law would be hard to point out. Someone needs to go to jail for this.