What's One More Retroactive Lie?
No actual thinking being can now be expecting to hear truth, from our Perpetrator Administration. The only meaningful listening choice is over which lie is more revealing. In the current case , the Bushies made a tactical error by letting us know that any emails were missing in the first place.
The first lie in the current series, remember, was in response to a request for internal Executive Branch emails, to show who was in on the deliberations regarding the firings of US Attorneys deemed by the Administration to be too lax in carrying out the Administration's planned purge of as many Democrats from office as possible by charging them, after the elections, with election frauds of various sorts. Some of the State US Attorneys weren't acting partisan enough in their prosecutions, and so were placed on hit lists, and subsequently replaced.
Of course this would be a partisan use of an agency, the Justice Department, that is supposed to impartially enforce the law. And of course the "loss" of ANY internal communications in the White House is a violation of law in itself. Naturally, once Congress found some cohones, after the 2006 elections, they started looking at outstanding fiascos like the US Attorney firings, and eventually asked the White House for emails, to see who had been in the loop. OOPS, we, uh, deleted them BY MISTAKE, cleverly responded the Bush gang.
They might have thought it was a perfect chance to do the Rove Two-Step, "Hey, we'll tell 'em we pushed the delete button by mistake, and while we're at it, there are all these OTHER incriminating emails we could do without, too!" (News of that has yet to break, and I'm just guessing here; but I have every confidence in these particular perps.) So they rolled out a story about mistakenly deleting hundreds of emails, forgetting how hard it is to actually LOSE an email, if a semi-competent professional is really looking for it, in the Executive Branch's legally-mandated cache of backup disks.
Now that they've had their noses rubbed in the fact that (who knew?) the state of technology simply does not support their first story, they have a choice of fall-back narratives. They could say that there ARE no backups -- oops, that wouldn't carry very well, in terms of basic competence and respect for law. Or they could say that all of the copies were accidently deleted AND THEN the backup disks were mistakenly dropped into a disk-shredder, but that might be just a few too many coincidences. Some scapegoat would have to be fired for emailing with their elbows, and they're running short of goats in the Goat, er, White House.
Or (one they tried) they could blame it all on the Nat Repugs, who (in an end-run on the records-keeping requirement) were maintaining an "alternate" White House email system. Trouble with that is that it still doesn't rise to the requirements of the records laws. The emails should have been backed up regardless of where they physically resided.
Of course... they could have come clean and handed over the emails they said were deleted.....Nah!
But hey, there's always reality redefinition -- remember when the Shrub tried to change the public's programming ex-post-facto, by claiming that he'd never urged us to "Stay The Course" in Iraq? Well that didn't play, because too many people were paying attention the first time. But now it's different. No one's really keeping track of the lies anymore, so who's going to notice, if they change one of the whoppers they've already told us?
Too bad about Dana Perino, though, who has to be made to look as if SHE told the first lie (she must have an unknown grudge against the prexy, to invent something so hateful!). But Presidential Spokespersons are basically disposable now anyway, since they get stuck telling the Shrub's lies for him, and eventually are forced to retire and write bitter memoirs of betrayal. And FAUX "news" is chock full of potential spokespersons. Has Anne Coulter had the job yet, or Michelle Malkin? Why not cut to the chase and give Bill O'Rielly the job?
This might sound transparently ridiculous to you and I, but remember that thirty percent of American citizens still believe Bush's lies -- and when he changes his story they believe the new version just as readily as they believed the old one. Most of these folks have had lots of practice, to be sure, trying to make sense of the Bible's internal inconsistencies. These people can believe that homosexuals should be forgiven -- at the very same time that they should also be stoned to death for doing what they've been forgiven for! Worshiping a schizophrenic God has put these voters in great shape for supporting this President.
However you frame it, we have an epidemic of incompetent (say it with me, children: "STUPID") citizens in our democracy. As much as anything, this is an important lesson to remember, even after this failed presidency retires to the shadows.
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Kill your TV, and free your mind.