Nixon and his goon squad were amateurs

I'm glad Henry Waxman has taken time off from investigating the things that Roger Clemens injects into his ass in favor of trying to find out some of the insidious things that have been going on inside the White House over the last several years.

MSNBC reports that, in response to a subpoena from federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, "though White House computer technicians hunted high and low, an entire week's worth of e-mail from Cheney's office was missing. The week was Sept. 30, 2003, to Oct. 6, 2003, the opening days of the Justice Department's probe into whether anyone at the White House leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame."

Ho Hum. We've known about these (and millions of other) "missing" White House emails for some time now. As Dan Froomkin reminds us: "The Bush White House has made a mockery of the Presidential Records Act and its requirement that official White House records -- including e-mails -- be preserved for posterity."

Just another one of those "laws" that the Bush Administration doesn't think it needs to follow (or, rather, doesn't need to follow). Like congressional subpoenas, or FISA, or the Fourth Amendment, or the Geneva Conventions to name just a few.

But what gets me about this story is how reporters, and Waxman and his committee, all seem to buy into this idea that this situation arose out of some kind of malfunction or negligence or incompetence. In these stories, for example, we are told that

• the White House's email collection and retention "process... was primitive"
  
• or that the White House had a "problem-plagued e-mail system"
• or "shortcomings... have plagued the White House e-mail system for six years"
• or the system was "inadequate"
• or that it had "serious security flaws"
• or it was "riddled with technical problems"

Ok, sure. The White House has a bunch of morons running its IT Department. I bet if we throw a quarter of a billion dollars or so at that problem, we can have it fixed just about the time the next President takes office.

Seriously, people. These "systems" and "processes" we are talking about do not have "flaws" or "shortcomings". And while they may be "primitive" or have "technical problems", they most certainly are not "inadequate" for achieving their actual purpose. Which is, of course, to obscure any and all evidence of wrongdoing undertaken by the amoral, self-seeking lawbreakers who have been lurking in the West Wing for the past seven years looting the treasury, flinging poo at their adversaries, making a mockery of the rule of law, and generally running this country into the ground as fast as they dare.