The latest installment of the Bush administration’s firm policy of doing whatever the fuck they want:
For years, the Bush administration has relied on an inadequate archiving system for storing the millions of e-mails sent through White House servers, despite court orders and statutes requiring the preservation of such records, according to documents and technical experts.
President Bush’s White House early on scrapped a custom archiving system that the Clinton administration had adopted under a federal court order. From 2001 to 2003, the Bush White House also recorded over computer backup tapes that provided a last line of defense for preserving e-mails, even though a similar practice landed the Clinton administration in legal trouble.
As a result, several years’ worth of electronic communication may have been lost, potentially including e-mails documenting administration actions in the run-up to the Iraq war.
I know you all are as shocked as I am. I expect the Democrats in Congress will write a strong letter of disapproval.
Zifnab
There’s only one way to respond to this, John.
CLINTON DID IT TOO!
anangryoldbroad
nah,the Dems will just send a miffed and indignant e-mail that will end up being cyber shredded like the rest of ’em.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
I just checked CSPAN. They’re measuring how strong. They’re trying to remember which one is the smaller one: teaspoons or tablespoons.
They think about 2-of-the-smaller-one’s-worth of stern language will do just fine.
myiq2xu
There was a political party called the “know-nothings” but I thought they were extinct. Turns out they are in the White House.
The FBI should put out a warrant for “Ida Know.” She’s responsible for all kinds of stuff in this administration.
Funny how this little boo-boos all have the effect of helping Chimpy cover-up his criminal behavior.
Jake
Looks like Tricky Dick II learned from his earlier mistakes.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Also, just to be a dick, I expect HRC will also commend the Washington Post for their great journalism, just so she doesn’t have to speak definitively about what Bush screwed up this time.
It’s her party, after all. Unless she proves to me otherwise.
In before “Transcendental”: I think the Pony will condemn it, but not before talking about a new era of better politics. Not great, but better than HRC. …which seems to be what his campaign is all about.
The Grand Panjandrum
But it will only be effective if TYPED IN ALL CAPS. YOU KNOW, SO THEY ARE TAKEN SERIOUSLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
myiq2xu
Did Bush award Rosemary Woods with a Medal of Freedom?
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR
COOLGOVERNING!!!!!!myiq2xu
Nothing says “inbred” like ALLCAPS
Zifnab
I take cold comfort in the fact that Bush has fucked up so much other stuff while in office that it seems impossible for him to have mastered the art of destroying back up tapes.
It’s damn hard to get rid of 10 million emails and walk away squeeky clean. There’s a trail in the White House. The question is, will the next resident be willing to dig it out.
Punchy
At this point, I fully expect the Bush team in go into full-on Fuck You mode. As in, blatantly and cravenly breaking statutes, knowing full well no one will dare stop them in an election year.
Anyone see the EPA dude who dissed Cali’s car emits just went “executive privelege, bitches” on Congress for all the papers and testimony they demanded? Is now EVERY executive dept going to use this?
I feel like we’re trying to deal with a 3-year old, but under rules that say we cannot touch them, scold them, or punish them. Only whispers and hand gestures are allowed.
TheFountainHead
Fixated.
Jen
Once again, you guys are looking at evidence other than what the press flacks report, and that is clearly unnecessary.
Nothing to see here, folks.
jrg
Maybe this is what the Republicans mean when they say you should only be concerned about searches and seizures if you have “something to hide”.
They destroyed all the evidence, therefore they have “nothing to hide”.
But seriously… There’s incriminating evidence on a hard drive somewhere. It’s just a matter of if and when it will be found.
myiq2xu
Well, at least we can be confident that if the Democrats win next Novemeber that accountability will be restored to the White House.
That’s because Congress and the killer poodles of the lapdog press will suddenly begin insisting on it again.
Remember the good old days when we had investigations of important stuff like the WH Travel Office firings and the Clinton’s Xmas card list? And blow-jobs.
OxyCon
“Dignity & Honor”
Dreggas
Well Hillary will be glad she doesn’t have to deal with that system, one less part of the clinton “legacy” to have to worry about.
myiq2xu
They still haven’t figured out who ordered the firing of nine US attorney’s beck in Dec. 2006
I’m guessing it was Ida Know
myiq2xu
I guess they shouldn’t have appointed Oroku Saki as the White House Archivist.
Dreggas
Remember them? Hell we’re about to relive them.
Pb
I thought it was Iydoh N. Trecall. Either that or someone else with a name out of a 419 letter.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
You mean, they didn’t assume that mode on Jan 21, 2000? Wow, you really do learn something everyday.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
I applaud your willingness to deface your dignity so that we may get our nerd chuckles.
teak111
Looks like a second rate email archive system, but first rate email scubbing software. Bettin at least DOD 7 or perhaps Peter Grunnman 30. Over writing once with data doesn’t mean lost forever. Over writing with random data 30 times, does.
Joomla Components
Should we really comment on the fact that the president of US is really not considering the humanity as the main motive..
Punchy
Considering Clinton was still Prez-o-dhint and the elections were still 10 months away, I didn’t assume that for that date.
Keep learning.
myiq2xu
I shame myself for the pleasure of others.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
awwww i FAIL.
/puts on opera
/puts on candlelight
/stands in corner
/starts flogging self with cat-o-nine-tails.
2001!
/flog
ow. 2001!
/flog
ach! 2001!
myiq2xu
Don’t beat yourself like that!
Turn on your webcam first!
Jake
Tony? Tony Fratto, that you?
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
/scared to know whether myiq meant “beat” or “beat off”
Xanthippas
The response may well be stronger than that.
Helena Montana
These revelations have been coming out over more than a week now, and the Dems haven’t uttered a peep, that I’m aware of. And they won’t because they’re going to take the Bush admin policy of doing whatever the fuck they want and run with it. They’re no more responsible than the GOP and there’s not a statesman among them, with the possible exception of Chris Dodd.
myiq2xu
What ever makes yer boat float.
Face
Hagel’s opened his yap a few times to bitch, too.
Zifnab
Yes, that and a pony will get you a free pony ride. We need some Duke Cunningham style nuts-in-a-jar treatment here. Or, barring that, it would be fun to watch Bush bust out the Clemency pen a couple more times. Nothing says “Honor and Integrity in the White House” like pardoning people as fast as they get indited.
Tsulagi
Whoa, slow down there. Don’t get too far ahead.
First there will be extensive polling to determine if there is sufficient interest to caucus on this issue. Since they love to caucus, high probability that’s a go. Then the hardball starts.
In the caucuses, focus group membership will be selected. The heat begins. Numerous focus groups will then agonize if action should be taken. Low confidence that’s an affirmative, but if bold, grammarians and font experts are called in. Sternly Worded Letter #xxx is painstakingly crafted. Some Dems steel themselves for its delivery and consequences, while many others wince in fear they’ve gone too far.
An aide reads aloud The Sternly Worded Letter to our Decider Man. Then spends an hour explaining to him the words in the two paragraphs say please don’t do that again.
Appalled once more at the assault on executive power, Bush prepares his standard reply. At an Oval Office window he moons the Dems and farts on their letter while giggling at the new aide’s response.
It’s a process.
myiq2xu
When Nancy Pelosi announced that impeachment was off the table it was like the police announcing they were going on strike.
mark
This administration has been a criminal enterprise that makes the mafia look like Girl Scouts. If every single one of these f*cks aren’t prosecuted for high crimes and misdemeanors they will have proven the constitution to be nothing but toilet paper.
God I don’t know who pisses me off more, these crooks, the gutless dems that let them get away with it or the media who are sucking their d*cks for a pat on the head.
myiq2xu
The problem is the focus groups will all be from “K” Street.
Xanthippas
Did you follow the link? It’s referring to potential criminal prosecution by a US attorney, or a special prosecutor, not any action/non-action by Congress.
Face
From Xanth’s link:
All of the bolded stuff is, by my guess, explicitly breaking a law.
And yet, I’d guess it’s only a 50-50 chance the Dems would persue even if the investigation comes back with a recc to indict.
Rudi
What is truly amazing is the Whitehouse website doesn’t have any storage or archival problems. Imagine the shocked presscorp if Barney videos were lost. Dig through the WH news archives, no missing pages there,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/
They also have an email news letter. I wonder if any problems here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/email/
Punchy
I’m getting tired of this statement. Look, she said it prior to the new Congress taking office, so as to not allow the RWM to trash the Dems as partisan whatevers. She was attempting to make nice with her R counterparts (probably not aware at the time how pointless this process would be)
You and I and she all know damn well she’ll vote to impeach should the evidence warrant it, and when questioned about the change, she’ll simply state, “I didn’t know back then how fucking corrupt these kitten skull-fuckers really are”.
myiq2xu
Then why does she keep ignoring impeachment resolutions?
The Grand Panjandrum
My
sisterwife got a good chuckle out of that one.Tsulagi
Yep.
Zifnab
Talk to me when we start seeing indictments. Until then, this is just another Abu Garaib “lynch the lowest ranking officer” probe as far as I’m concerned.
Ooooh no! Scathing Report! Possibility of the chance of an opportunity to look into the appointment of a committee to oversee the potential research into having discussions on appointing a special investigator. I’m practically breathless with anticipation.
Dennis - SGMM
Makes you wonder if NSA overwrites its backup tapes. “Osama bin Who?”
myiq2xu
Oh shitsky!
Since this is one of those “independent” groups rather then a campaign organization, they can basically do whatever the fuck they want.
If Obama can’t handle what the Clintons are throwing at him, imagine what will happen when the Right Wing Sleaze Machine is going after him.
To quote Slim Pickens, “He’ll be like a chicken that got caught in a tractor’s nuts.”
Punchy
This shit is funny.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
hahahahahahaha you haven’t been around modern democrats that long, have you?
hehehehe “Warrant”…. “Simply”…. “state”! HAHAHAHAHA
Listen good: the entire Democratic party, with the exception of these impertinent upstarts trying to push Hillary around, has forgotten how willpower works.
1.) Act as if you are in charge
2.) Others begin to believe it
3.) Others start acting like you are in charge
4.) You’re in charge! WOW! HOW NEAT!
Neither Pelosi nor Reid have sufficient understanding that tone precedes substance. It does not compliment substance.
In fact, if ANY Democrat had realized that, they wouldn’t have let Reid into the leadership.
This is the nature of the pattern called “depression”.
1.) Lack of impulse creates
2.) Lack of action creates
3.) Lack of feedback creates
4.) Lack of motive creates
1.) Lack of impulse creates… (REPEAT)
The Other Steve
Maybe it’s cause I’m a techie, but I never really liked this whole idea of using emails for lawsuits.
email essentially eliminated the telephone. Yes, it also eliminated the typewritten memo and letter, but it’s more about the telephone.
Nobody records telephone calls.
Cassidy
has anyone considered that the Dems don’t want this settled? That would strip them of the same potential power. These are politicians we’re talking about after all.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Yes, but that’s frightening and puts us into a depression on the level of your first read-through of Nineteen Eighty Four.
/sticks head back in sand
John S.
Naturally. I’m sure Hillary is looking forward to becoming the Supreme Chancellor of the United States.
The Other Steve
WE DEMAND A FRED THOMPSON THREAD!!!
WE DEMAND A FRED THOMPSON THREAD!!!
WE DEMAND A FRED THOMPSON THREAD!!!
WE DEMAND A FRED THOMPSON THREAD!!!
WE DEMAND A FRED THOMPSON THREAD!!!
WE DEMAND A FRED THOMPSON THREAD!!!
GIVE US OUR FRED THOMPSON THREAD, OR SUFFER OUR WRATH!
The Other Steve
And fix your exclamation marks!!!
Ed Drone
Actually, I think this time it may rise to the level of a letter of condemnation (politely phrased, of course).
Ed
Punchy
Bush — WE HATE BROWNIES (look at Iraq!) WE HATE BLACKIES (look at Katrina!) WE HATE REDSKINS (we’re vetoing EVERYTHING from here on out!)
What a fucking asshole shithead. Doggin on Codetalkers, now?
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Innit just easier to phrase that Bush: “My peeps and I have got ours” ?
This pit I feel in my stomach… hatred, disgust, desire to cause pain on the actors of the Bush Administration… it’s never gonna go away, is it?
Bruce Moomaw
OK, Dems, try forcing the Administration to indict anyone for this. Or try impeaching Bush and removing him from office. I dare you.
We do owe the Bush Administration one enormous debt: it’s exposed the fact that America has ALWAYS been a fake democracy — from the moment the gavel came down on the very first session of Congress — and that fact has been concealed for the last two centuries only by a fantastic run of historical coincidences. It’s now over. The supposed “democratic checks and balances” of the Constitution were always based entirely on the Framers’ cheerful confidence that political parties would never come into existence at all (as James Madison assured the Anti-Federalists at the time), and so they have always been totally useless in protecting against tyranny by one political party that controls both the White House and more than about 40% of the Senate. All it took was an administration smart enough and ruthless enough to recognize that fact and fully utilize it, and that administration has finally appeared. It won’t be the last one — in fact, from now on, I imagine they’ll ALL be like this one, now that the Bushites have shown that it works.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Never was any sort of democracy. Is Republic.
Not entirely. They were hoping, but they weren’t that stupid. How else do you think the most lightweight system of governance, version 1 of such a system, even, managed to get us this far?
All it took was an administration that was smart enough to realize that “checks” just come down to words and technical nullifications, and few people are going to go down to the White House and physically remove the guy running your military.
And the pioneer you have to thank for that? Jackson.
Bruce Moomaw
Well, yeah; you’ve got a point. “Mr Chief Justice Marshall has made his decision [to stop me from exterminating the Cherokees]; now let him enforce it!” But no one from Jackson till now has shown that much enthusiasm for pulling aside the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz who really runs the much-vaunted American system of government.
Bruce Moomaw
Keep in mind, though, that Jackson got his way because he had landslide popularity and a landslide party majority in Congress. When Nixon made moves in the same direction, he got clobbered, and control of the military had already quietly been taken away from him by his own Defense Secretary — but that was because, and only because, he didn’t have that crucial 40%+ in the Senate, and he made the still-inexplicable mistake of retaining his tape recordings of his own criminal activities. Nobody will ever make THAT mistake again.
Bruce Moomaw
Henry Waxman has just revealed that the E-mails destroyed were destroyed ONLY on days when they might have incriminated Dick Cheney — and, he, personally, had them erased. Now, as I say, just try doing something about it under the current American Constitution.
Xenos
If that is not impeachable, then nothing is.
I thought we were guaranteed a republican form of government. Can we have a constitutional convention now? Because if our old constitution is broken, I have some ideas for a new one…
Bruce Moomaw
Getting back to that comment by Madison: It was a response to George Mason’s expressed concern that giving the President unlimited pardoning rights would allow him to cover up his own administration’s dirty activities by pardoning any aides who were under investigation. Madison assured him that, if any President ever did anything that suspicious-looking, the Senate would certainly vote overwhelmingly to remove him from office, since none of its members would belong to the sam political party as him. It was the only really huge mistake the Framers made; but, my, was it a lulu.
Bruce Moomaw
Xenos: “If our old Constitution is broken, I have some ideas for a new one.”
So do I, Xenos. Lots of them, which wouldn’t even require touching one speck of the Bill of Rights. And so do a lot of other people. But we’ll never get a chance to act on them until the country breaks down completely — and since that breakdown is likely to take the form of a military dictatorship (definitely run by right-wingers, and quite possibly by military officers who are also Christian fundamentalist fanatics), we almost certainly won’t get a chance to act on them then either. Combine this with all the other coming attractions over the next two or three decades (nuclear terrorism, genetically engineered doomsday plagues manufactured by individual people, the disappearance of the world’s remaining oil and the consequent death by starvation and nuclear world war of most of humanity for that reason alone, the disastrous effects of global warming), and I think you can see that, in the end, the only thing that any of us can do is (in Mencken’s words) “Sit back, relax, and enjoy the greatest show on Earth” — namely, the Apocalypse. (And — to quote Philip Larkin’s advice — “Don’t have any kids yourself.” If you already have, well, it’s just too bad for them.)
Xenos
Smedley Butler.
We lucked out last time, so maybe we will luck out again.
As for the other doomsday scenarios, human culture may have developed enough to deal with them. Otherwise, it is time for a social evolutionary bottleneck.
Tax Analyst
Well, I, for one, am certainly cheered by this thread…so just where DID I put that bottle of sedatives?
The Truffle
I wonder if the Dems’ hands are simply tied. I’m sure Conyers, Waxman, et al. have done everything they can to get Dubya to remember the concept of three branches of government, only to be rebuffed.
At least I hope that’s the case.