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.

Some thoughts on Presidential Powers

I don't believe the president, any president be it Bush, or Clinton, or the goddamn Dalai Lama, should have unchecked or unfettered powers. One of the many, many issues I have with the Bush administration is the aggressive expansion of executive power and how hard it is going to be to put the genie back in the bottle once it's out. Because out, it's a hard thing to surrender.

I think that the only way it could be done is if there is some sort of "Truth Commission" after the elections in 2008 where Congress conducts real investigations with real penalties for what's happened over the past 6 years. Of course, it will never happen.

I'm afraid that the Dems are slowing down their pursuit of Bush et. al. because they feel that it may be their turn in 2008 and why should they take those tools away when it will be their guy/girl who gets to weild them? Like the slow walking of the Gonzalez investigations (where a number of Dems were in no hurry to wrap them up because they believed that the great press and the embarrassing issues were a winner - they'd STILL be investigating without sanction if Gonzalez hadn't up and quit), I fear that they think these could be winning tools once they control all 3 branches of government. Which is, of course, silly. The Republican noise machine, sputtering somewhat but still effective, would never allow a Democratic president to get away with half of what the Bushies have gotten away with (and I'd agree with them). Dems could slow walk these investigations too in hopes of retaining the powers only to be bashed on the head with those powers. It is right in principle and right in politics to move aggressively to investigate an administration out of control.

Hillary is a prime example I can point to to explain why I'm so down on the Dems these days. She has recently said that she would review presidential powers if she was elected president and would consider giving some of those up. That's a good thing and the issue of presidential power is one that I've been struggling with for a while. Then, she turns around and issues a wishy-washy response on what she would do about FISA. It doesn't get much more clear than FISA. Are you willing to grant blanket immunity to companies without even knowing what they've done, when we're pretty sure that they illegally aiding the government in spying on us, or are you not? Are you interested in the rule of law, or are you not? And sadly, I can't say that Dems these days are 100% behind the rule of law. And that is profoundly disappointing.


There are some bright spots - Waxman for instance - but looking at the overall picture, I'm not at all encouraged.

Meanings and Meaninglessness

“We do not torture.”

At what point do those words lose their meaning? At what point can we say that those words are, in fact, incomprehensible? And what does it mean when we’ve reached that point?

With the ways that this administration has parsed, dissembled, and outright lied about this topic I don’t feel that anyone can say, with any authority, that they know what the words, “We do not torture” mean anymore.

I don’t know what to do about that.

Supreme Court

Wasn't it Justice Roberts who said he didn't want to release many 5-4 decisions as he thought they were bad for the Court? If I remember correctly, he was supposed to be working towards promoting more unanimity in opinions coming from the Court. Another great uniter I guess.