'Delete' Doesn't Always Mean 'Delete!'

December 14, 2009 2:39 PM

Computer technicians have uncovered 22 million messages believed lost by the George W. Bush administration. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) and George Washington University's National Security Archive "...reached a final settlement of their long-running lawsuits challenging the failure of the Bush White House and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to take any action after confronted with evidence that millions of emails had gone missing from Bush White House servers over a two and one-half year period." "Documents produced so far show the Bush White House was lying when officials claimed no emails were ever missing. The record now proves incontrovertibly that Bush administration officials deliberately ignored the problem and, in fact, knowingly allowed it to worsen."* "We may never discover the full story of what happened here," said Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director. "It seems like they just didn't want the e-mails preserved."

TPM: Obama Administration Will Restore Missing Bush White House Emails.

CNN: Millions of White House E-mails Recovered.

NPR: Obama To Produce Millions Of Missing Bush E-Mails To Settle Lawsuit.

posted by ericb (86 comments total)

Wonkette: 22 Million Missing Bush Emails Found, Probably In Alberto Gonzales’ Pants
posted by ericb at 2:40 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Well, now, this should prove very interesting indeed.
posted by five fresh fish at 2:41 PM on December 14, 2009

So incompetent they didn't even remember The Nixon Rule.

You know. The one that starts with "Burn the tapes."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:44 PM on December 14, 2009 [4 favorites]

Awesome. Now Obama & Co. will FINALLY have something that will allow them to press charges against Bush & Co.
posted by nushustu at 2:44 PM on December 14, 2009 [3 favorites]

The record now proves incontrovertibly that Bush administration officials deliberately ignored the problem and, in fact, knowingly allowed it to worsen.

Well, duh.
posted by mrnutty at 2:44 PM on December 14, 2009

I wonder, will this be a bigger scandal than climategate? Whats in those messages?
posted by ben242 at 2:45 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Heh, I remember back in the day, when this came out and Pat Leahy said something like "There's no way those emails could have dissapeared, they go through too many servers." And someone chimed in here on metafilter (I don't remember who) saying that it sounded like Leahy didn't know how email worked, etc.

People recover emails all the time in during lawsuits and criminal stuff. It's not at all surprising that these were recoverable.
posted by delmoi at 2:45 PM on December 14, 2009

The two groups say the 22 million White House e-mails were previously mislabeled and effectively lost.

Uh huh. Mislabeled. As...what? Viagra spam? A never-ending round of the alphabet game?
posted by rtha at 2:46 PM on December 14, 2009

Coming so soon after the whole climate-email fiasco, I look forward to seeing far-right talking heads attempt to explain why it's wrong to read these.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:48 PM on December 14, 2009 [24 favorites]

I'm shocked, shocked to discover...
posted by theora55 at 2:48 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

But the public might not see any of the e-mails for quite some time because they will now go through the National Archives normal process for releasing presidential and agency records.

Any evidence of wrongdoing will be swept under Obama's carpet. Got to keep the country moving forward.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:49 PM on December 14, 2009 [7 favorites]

We may never discover the full story of what happened here

I'm willing to bet money on this. If there's one thing I know about the power elite, it's that they protect their own.
posted by rocket88 at 2:51 PM on December 14, 2009 [3 favorites]

"Documents produced so far show the Bush White House was lying when officials claimed no emails were ever missing. The record now proves incontrovertibly that Bush administration officials deliberately ignored the problem and, in fact, knowingly allowed it to worsen."

This is my surprised face.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 2:51 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Oh, here's the comment I was talking about

"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt.

This is a rather silly comment from someone who doesn't really understand how email works.

The only server that matters is the ultimate destination for the email. That said, given that many people read their email exclusively through a browser, and most email clients default to never deleting anything, the most likely default case is that emails sit on the server forever.

Heh.

Awesome. Now Obama & Co. will FINALLY have something that will allow them to press charges against Bush & Co.

Dude, we have to look forward not backward. Upward not downward and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards justice.
posted by delmoi at 2:51 PM on December 14, 2009 [23 favorites]

It appears that some people relevant to the investigation have died in odd circumstances:

On December 18, 2008, Bush IT expert Mike Connell, a highly skilled pilot, was killed in a sudden crash while flying his small aircraft from Washington DC to his Akron/Canton home airport. The cause of the crash is still unknown and under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

posted by boo_radley at 2:53 PM on December 14, 2009 [6 favorites]

"Under the terms of the settlement, the Executive Office of the President (EOP) will restore a total of 94 days of missing emails, which will then be sent to NARA for preservation and eventual access under either the Presidential Records Act or the Federal Records Act. The dates for restoration were chosen based on email volume and external events because there simply was not enough money to restore all the missing emails."

It's amusing to find where my government chooses to draw the line on spending.
posted by vapidave at 2:54 PM on December 14, 2009 [17 favorites]

from the TPM link: The Obama administration appears to have gone above and beyond. As part of the agreement, it pledged to recover presidential records that the court had ruled the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue over. Some of those are from the office of vice President Dick Cheney, which played a key role in numerous Bush administration controversies, and developed a reputation as a particularly zealous defender of government secrecy.

Because of funding constraints, not all the emails will be restored. According to CREW, "the dates for restoration were chosen based on email volume and external events."

Funding constraints? I'll chip in $5 to see all those letters revealed, and another $5 if they'rre archived and cross-indexed.

For consistency's sake, the same standard needs to be applied to these emails as should have been done to the climate-change emails - taking sections out of context, while exciting and Outragefilter-worthy, does not reveal the whole picture.
posted by dubold at 2:57 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

Uh huh. Mislabeled. As...what?

Probably messages from the EPA, so they were marked "do not open."
posted by filthy light thief at 2:57 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

Uh huh. Mislabeled. As...what?

Probably messages from the EPA, so they were marked "do not open."
posted by filthy light thief at 5:57 PM on December 14 [+] [!]

like, "lalalala I can't heeeear you!?!!!1!?"
posted by toodleydoodley at 3:00 PM on December 14, 2009

When asked for comment, former President Bush said "durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr."
posted by Damn That Television at 3:00 PM on December 14, 2009

*laughs*

*cries*
posted by rtha at 3:00 PM on December 14, 2009

Surely this ohwhybother
posted by hangashore at 3:02 PM on December 14, 2009 [9 favorites]

The "missing" emails will also no doubt provide links to the communications Rove et al outsourced through RNC and other servers in order to subvert their recordkeeping obligations under Federal law.
posted by minimii at 3:02 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Now Obama & Co. will FINALLY have something that will allow them to press charges against Bush & Co.

Riiiiight. I wouldn't hold my breath on that. Just sayin'.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:03 PM on December 14, 2009 [3 favorites]

I have been telling my husband, who froths at the mouth when he thinks of anything connected with the Bush administration, and is convinced none of them will ever be held to account, that the other shoes were going to continue to drop, and drop, and drop. There is so much more we will continue to hear about in the coming years. I am confident this will include all the interesting info the emails contain.

I think the really fascinating question is what the Obama administration will do about prosecuting for the misfeasance I think we will be learning about as time rolls by.
posted by bearwife at 3:04 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Dunno about you, but, um, it's 15 cents a GB on amazon s3, and free data transfer in. 22 million emails, shouldn't be more than a couple hundred bucks a month. I'll chip in.
posted by Freen at 3:04 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

Awesome. Now Obama & Co. will FINALLY have something that will allow them to press charges against Bush & Co.

At this point I'd settle on seeing Cheney getting kicked in the nuts by a kindergartener.
posted by Burhanistan at 3:07 PM on December 14, 2009 [25 favorites]

Funding constraints? I'll chip in $5 to see all those letters revealed, and another $5 if they'rre archived and cross-indexed.

I smell another Friends of MeFi project brewing. Or this could be a Kickstarter project.

Pledge $5 or more:
You will receive an electronic invite to watch the email archive posted online, piece by piece.

Pledge $10 or more:
You will receive access to the cross-indexed database a week before it goes public.

Pledge $20 or more:
You will receive a personalized email from the Board of Directors, thanking your for your support of a more transparent government.

Pledge $50 or more:
You will receive a DVD archive of the cross-indexed DB.

Pledge $100 or more:
You will receive a badge, numbered ID card and membership into the illustrious Elite-level CREW club-house.

Pledge $1,000 or more:
You will receive a DVD archive with personal addresses intact.
*NOTE* Cheney no longer lives at the address listed in the contact information. His mistress does, though.
posted by filthy light thief at 3:14 PM on December 14, 2009 [5 favorites]

At this point I'd settle on seeing Cheney getting kicked in the nuts by a kindergartener.

I take heart in knowing that being forced to watch his machinations, coverups and other work undone by his successors will be both more painful and more permanent.
posted by zarq at 3:15 PM on December 14, 2009 [3 favorites]

This story has always perplexed me. There are a few terms I think I need to have defined for me, in the specific context of the Bush administration and e-mail:

• "Missing"

• "Lost"

• "Found"

• "Accidentally"
posted by bicyclefish at 3:16 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

bearwife: "I think the really fascinating question is what the Obama administration will do about prosecuting for the misfeasance I think we will be learning about as time rolls by."

Want me to ruin the suspense for you?
posted by Joe Beese at 3:16 PM on December 14, 2009 [8 favorites]

On December 18, 2008, Bush IT expert Mike Connell, a highly skilled pilot, was killed in a sudden crash while flying his small aircraft from Washington DC to his Akron/Canton home airport. The cause of the crash is still unknown and under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Something about icing, and failure to retrofit the plane with a carburetor heater, IIRC. Here is the Mike Connell MeFi thread.
posted by fixedgear at 3:17 PM on December 14, 2009

rtha - Uh huh. Mislabeled. As...what?

filthy light thief - Probably messages from the EPA, so they were marked "do not open."

toodleydoodley - like, "lalalala I can't heeeear you!?!!!1!?"

Sad, but very true.

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

Published: June 25, 2008
posted by filthy light thief at 3:19 PM on December 14, 2009 [6 favorites]

"We may never discover the full story of what happened here,"

IN RELATED NEWS: SKY IS BLUE, GRASS IS GREEN.
posted by elizardbits at 3:20 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

!
posted by maus at 3:22 PM on December 14, 2009

It appears that some people relevant to the investigation have died in odd circumstances:

The CIA bozos really need a new M.O., this one is getting stale. They used to be so creative, setting up patsies to take the fall, misinfo, multiple ops on the same target, international assassins, Mafia tie ins, Columbian drug money. It was all so colorful and interesting. Now it's just plane crash after plane crash, so boring. The CIA that killed Kennedy was building an empire, this one's just covering it's ass, leaving conspiracy buffs out in the cold, pining for the good old days.
posted by doctor_negative at 3:24 PM on December 14, 2009 [8 favorites]

surely, this...
posted by Afroblanco at 3:24 PM on December 14, 2009

Fortunately, 90% of the emails were debunked by Snopes.
posted by furtive at 3:25 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

This is my surprised face.

: |
posted by shmegegge at 3:32 PM on December 14, 2009

You turn your head sideways?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:35 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

They're bluffing, George! Don't admit to anything!
posted by king walnut at 3:36 PM on December 14, 2009

Matt Drudge is totally missing on this one. Not the slightest mention... huh, go figure.
posted by R. Mutt at 3:39 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

When even the rabid left (which I would probably count myself a part of) has to take a minute to dust off the memory of this particular Bush scandal, you know you're in trouble. Unfortunately, it's just one of many Bush scandals and approximately no one with the power to actually do something about it will do something about it.

It's rather amazing that the true power of the Bush administration was simply being the Big Daddy figure in a country apparently half-full of folks with a Big Daddy complex. Then you can commit all the fucking scandals you want, dozens of 'em, let 'em pile up, doesn't matter, nothing bad will happen to Big Daddy.
posted by zardoz at 3:39 PM on December 14, 2009

*NOTE* Cheney no longer lives at the address listed in the contact information. His mistress does, though.

Joe Biden?
posted by The World Famous at 3:40 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

"lost"
posted by Flunkie at 3:53 PM on December 14, 2009

bearwife: "I think the really fascinating question is what the Obama administration will do about prosecuting for the misfeasance I think we will be learning about as time rolls by."

Want me to ruin the suspense for you?

We shall see. As more information comes out, the administration will be under increasing pressure to prosecute.
posted by bearwife at 3:55 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

I wish we had a live connection to a machine testing Cheney's blood pressure. Or at the least, a record of it when this all began breaking.
posted by Atreides at 3:55 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

The amount of potential scandals that this could provide evidence for is hard to contemplate. The fact that these emails are out there now makes me want to wait a few months and then resubmit a FOIA request I submitted a few years back.

One of the things I was very busy with during the height of the Iraq conflict was interacting with soldiers. So, when I posted about video supporting the use of White Phosphorus in Fallujah, contrary to US claims... and one of my friends who was an artilleryman asked "How can the government claim we didn't use WP in Fallujah, when our own military magazines talk about it?", I got the evidence from him and spread it all over the web.

This categorically proved that the US used "shake and bake" combined white phosphorus / high explosive strikes in the high density civilian neighborhoods of Fallujah. And while this fact was widely ignored by the US press, British papers were soon all over the story, and the US State Department was forced to retract previous denials on their website about the offensive use of White Phosphorus being just a rumor, with WP used only for illumination purposes only.

The simple fact is, this was a pretty transparent lie to *ANYONE* who knew the basic facts of military ordinance. White Phosphorus is no longer used in the US military's illumination rounds, precisely because of its volatile, unquenchable, incendiary nature. Our British allies certainly don't want it in their arsenal, because they see it as a potential violation of international chemical weapons treaties, if misused.

The simple fact is that someone(s) in the Bush Administration provided transparently false information to the US public on the nature of the Fallujah conflict. There was presumably some degree of correspondence between the US State Department and the DoD to create their transparently false statement in the first place... and it would be good for the American people to know how it came to be that their government lied to them in the first place.

And so, I put in a FOIA request to get this information... and had it rejected for numerous really lame reasons.

The fact of that matter though is that the government misled knowingly lied to the public on all sorts of issues during the Bush administration... and *ANY* of us are entitled to ask questions and seek answers on how these fabrications were created.

Many of the answers will be embarrassing... but it's up to us to ask the questions. And we should. Any of us, really... because the fact is, many of those who are currently doing the asking are journalists... and they oftentimes have reasons not to release facts to the public, with many of them being simply that the stories in question aren't new and newsy enough anymore.

If you want the facts, ask them yourself... and make sure to share them online afterwards, where they might benefit others!
posted by markkraft at 4:00 PM on December 14, 2009 [33 favorites]

Wait, now I'm even more confused by the way the emails were 'lost'.

They're recovering 94 days' worth of emails that cover a span of two years? I had understood that all emails within a date range were completely gone. Was this incorrect? Were there only certain days that had missing emails, and other days had been available? Are they only recovering the emails for these few days for some reason?

I'd appreciate a description of the more technical aspects of what was done.
posted by FuManchu at 4:00 PM on December 14, 2009

It appears that some people relevant to the investigation have died in odd circumstances...

Nonsense. It's just those damn Wellstone Winds again...
posted by rollbiz at 4:01 PM on December 14, 2009 [3 favorites]

I hope no one thinks I'm a habitual debunker here or anything, but as for Bush's IT guy's mysterious death -- flying a small plane from DC to Ohio a week before Christmas -- it sounds sketchy when you look at the timing from the angle of Bush having a month left in office, and less sketchy when you look at the timing as being a week before Christmas. I was on a plane from DC to Cleveland a few nights later, and the ice storm that we encountered was so bad that we were in a holding pattern above Cleveland almost an hour before we could land, and Cleveland Hopkins was completely shut down almost immediately after we did. Weather is not great at that time of year, and it's not a great time to be flying a small plane.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:05 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: always twirling, twirling, twirling toward justice.
Sorry.

Shame they won't torrent the email archive. Storage and analysis would be free, benefit of crowdsourcing.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:07 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

I take heart in knowing that being forced to watch his machinations, coverups and other work undone by his successors will be both more painful and more permanent.

And always wondering when he's going to have to flee prosecution. Some evil of his is going to turn up sooner or later in such a way that he'll have to either run or face justice. Just the other week, some near-centenarian started undergoing prosecution for his Nazi past. Same thing is gonna happen in the end to Cheney if he doesn't die first.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:14 PM on December 14, 2009

Maybe this will finally take down the Bush administration.
posted by telstar at 4:17 PM on December 14, 2009 [3 favorites]

Surely this will provide an excellent occasion to retire an old joke after so many years of loyal service?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 4:26 PM on December 14, 2009 [4 favorites]

I wish we had a live connection to a machine testing Cheney's blood pressure.

I'm not sure that enough of the original human tissue remains for him to even have blood pressure, or for it to be anything other than steady, cybernetically controlled 120/80.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 4:31 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

there simply was not enough money to restore all the missing emails

Military budget of the United States, 2009: $518.3 billion.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:35 PM on December 14, 2009 [3 favorites]

Shame they won't torrent the email archive. Storage and analysis would be free, benefit of crowdsourcing.

C'mon Leakers, you know you want to!

And I gots me a database and a whole lot of Perl experience just waiting for this opportunity.
posted by mikelieman at 5:04 PM on December 14, 2009

"I wish we had a live connection to a machine testing Cheney's blood pressure."

Um... think Hannibal Lecter.

His pulse never got above 85, even when he ate the Bill of Rights.
posted by markkraft at 5:06 PM on December 14, 2009 [14 favorites]

kiraracha - I hate that kind of lying statistic, when the "special expenditures" just approved last month were $650 billion right on top. The actual military budget of the United States tops a trillion a year.

We just can't afford health care, like those rich countries in Europe. Or to restore millions and millions of emails that only concern the dead past anyway.
posted by Michael Roberts at 5:08 PM on December 14, 2009 [4 favorites]

I'm delighted these emails have been recovered. I'm also perplexed that no one has held the Bush Administration accountable for failing to comply with record keeping requirements. It's possible it was just simple neglect, not deliberate malfeasance, but either way they did not do their job correctly. Is the Obama administration doing better?

But without any evidence, trying to tie this to a conspiracy surrounding Mike Connell's death is inappropriate. Flying small airplanes is not the safest activity in the world. Flying them in bad weather is somewhat dangerous. Here's the NTSB factual report on the accident. (For the truly curious, here's the ATC flight track). There's no probable cause report yet. But if you look at the weather at the time he tried to land at KCAK and read the exchange with ATC when he's trying to make the ILS approach, it sure sounds like a pretty common, tragic accident on landing in bad weather. Of course, maybe the NTSB is in on the grand conspiracy. Or maybe They tinkered with his instruments.
posted by Nelson at 5:09 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

bicyclefish: "This story has always perplexed me. There are a few terms I think I need to have defined for me, in the specific context of the Bush administration and e-mail [...]:"

Here's a handy guide:

Missing: we hope we deleted them.
Lost: we definitely deleted them.
Found: deleted doesn't mean what we think it means.
Accidentally: intentionally.

posted by FishBike at 5:13 PM on December 14, 2009 [11 favorites]

Add a color code to that, and you have a winner.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:17 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

For the truly curious, here's the ATC flight track

Status: Arrived 51 weeks ago.

That's...optimistic.
posted by rollbiz at 5:23 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Surely this will provide an excellent occasion to retire an old joke after so many years of loyal service?

What joke?
posted by telstar at 5:31 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

If you spun it right, not only could you raise enough money for total restoration, but I'll bet you could get the neocons and wingnuts to donate the lion's share. I mean, don't they want to archive every single moment of the great and glorious Bush Administration for posterity? These e-mails are a goldmine of wisdom and heroism!
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:35 PM on December 14, 2009

This is my surprised face:

t(>.<t)
posted by potch at 5:39 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

telstar: Tais joke. "Maybe this will finally take down the Bush administration." See what they did there with the italics?
posted by fixedgear at 5:43 PM on December 14, 2009

This joke.
posted by fixedgear at 5:43 PM on December 14, 2009

Documents produced so far show the Bush White House was lying when officials claimed no emails were ever missing.

Watch for a talking point that says that the Bush White House was telling the truth all along, for these are the very emails that were alleged to have "gone missing" and yet - here they are!
posted by flabdablet at 5:45 PM on December 14, 2009

I'm also perplexed that no one has held the Bush Administration accountable for failing to comply with record keeping requirements.

The best I can find, under the Federal Records Act the penalty for this would be "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."

In the state I live in, destruction of public records before their retention period is up is a misdemeanor with a maximum fine of $500. No one has ever been prosecuted for that. But in cases where the records destruction was involved with hiding some skulduggery, the person ends up being charged with perjury or obstruction of justice or whatever it is they were trying to hide in the first place.

I would be happy to see Bush & Co. put away for three years for deleting these emails, kind of like having to lock up Al Capone for tax evasion. I'll take whatever I can get. If the Justice Department did have the wherewithal to go after Bush for disobeying the Federal Records Act, I would some assume some IT guy or Assistant Deputy Aide would end up getting the blame.
posted by marxchivist at 5:55 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

delmoi: "Heh, I remember back in the day, when this came out and Pat Leahy said something like "There's no way those emails could have dissapeared, they go through too many servers." And someone chimed in here on metafilter (I don't remember who) saying that it sounded like Leahy didn't know how email worked, etc. "

Well, Leahy is still wrong on the technical points — modern email doesn't pass through that many servers. It's uncommon for messages to get relayed very much; inside an organization, it's entirely possible for most messages between two users in the same workgroup to only touch one server, before backups. (Particularly if it's Exchange or Notes, where the same server can handle incoming and outgoing mail.)

He's was and is right in the sense that modern systems are complex, and it's actually quite difficult and takes a fair bit of effort to reliably expunge information in a way that's truly irrecoverable.

There are people (Information Assurance specialists, generally) whose entire jobs consist of scrubbing-down systems when material above the classification that the system is supposed to handle "spills" onto it. It is a major pain in the ass, but something that happens fairly regularly on systems with lots of users.

The interesting thing to me is that, because the Bush crew didn't just call up their IA people and tell them to expunge whatever information they didn't want the public to see (instead rather halfassedly hoping that their lack of archival policies would let it happen naturally), it's pretty clear that they knew destroying the information would be illegal. Not much room for plausible deniability there; all they can do is try to claim that they were so inept they never got an archive policy in place, and that it was totally unintentional.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:40 PM on December 14, 2009

bearwife : I have been telling my husband, who froths at the mouth when he thinks of anything connected with the Bush administration, and is convinced none of them will ever be held to account, that the other shoes were going to continue to drop, and drop, and drop.

The shoes started dropping before he even took office - Hell, some evidence exists of irregularities even in the primary leading up to 2000, nevermind Harris (with the Supremes' permission) et al shitting on both the US and Florida constitutions to literally hand Bush the election his family bought fair 'n square.

So unfortunately, while I love the sentiment, your husband has every right to froth - It doesn't matter how much evidence we eventually see of that administration's crimes, no one important will ever sit in a cage as a result.
posted by pla at 8:01 PM on December 14, 2009

It's sort of interesting to notice the amount of news coverage THIS email scandal is getting: compare-and-contrast the coverage of "Bush junta lying to America" to the non-scandal of the "East Anglia climate scientists".
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 8:19 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

The missing emails were NOT just recently found. Rove's people have just finished rewriting them.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:28 PM on December 14, 2009

So incompetent they didn't even remember The Nixon Rule.

You know. The one that starts with "Burn the tapes."

Or the one that starts with "Empty the recycle bin using a 7-pass DOD wiping algorithm."
posted by ALongDecember at 8:53 PM on December 14, 2009

Well, if nothing else,it'll make a handy bludgeon to beat the Republicans over the head with. Last month it was the torture allegations that suddenly, might need investigating. I'm still laughing about how that lured Cheney from his lair to defend torture as the American way. What a meatball. How did these clowns get elected?
posted by atchafalaya at 8:58 PM on December 14, 2009

It starts making sense when you put "elect" in scare quotes. You're right though, there's still an awful lot of fathomlessly stupid enablers, er voters.
posted by blue shadows at 9:20 PM on December 14, 2009

How did these clowns get elected?

They didn't.
posted by amyms at 11:35 PM on December 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

If only we had democracy.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:45 PM on December 14, 2009 [1 favorite]

Is there any mention anywhere of how the messages were found and where, and is there any explanation cited for why they were where they were and why they were thought to have not existed any more?
posted by Anything at 1:02 AM on December 15, 2009

Democracy, lol good luck with that. I know this is preached by fearmongers but think about what sort of political system is at the base of every single company. Than realise that you're life is not governed by the government its governed by the company.
posted by Chamunks at 5:34 AM on December 15, 2009

I wish we had a live connection to a machine testing Cheney's blood pressure. Or at the least, a record of it when this all began breaking.

He doesn't give a shit. He's gotten away with so much, and such nefarious stuff, and made so much money off of it, that he's already won for keeps. And he's not going to live long enough for us to prosecute him for treason, which we wouldn't do anyway.
posted by desuetude at 7:47 AM on December 15, 2009

And he's not going to live long enough for us to prosecute him for treason, which we wouldn't do anyway.

If I were a gambling man, I'd place odds on Cheney keeling over from heart failure by early 2011.
posted by Burhanistan at 9:01 AM on December 15, 2009

atchafalaya : How did these clowns get elected?

By effectively convincing about half the country that fear and anger were the only appropriate responses to the world we find ourselves in.

Sadly, about half the country still agrees with this philosophy.
posted by quin at 9:03 AM on December 15, 2009

By effectively convincing about half the country that fear and anger were the only appropriate responses to the world we find ourselves in.

Actually, those are the appropriate responses. It's the appropriate targets we're having trouble with.

I mean, I'm about as afraid and angry as ever, aren't you?
posted by emjaybee at 10:40 AM on December 15, 2009