To The Best Of My Recollection...

Sometimes I just have to laugh at how absurd politicians (and lawyers) can be.

Like this article, Lawyer: Rove Didn't Mean to Delete Email.

According to the article, Rove sent some emails using an official White House email system (which automatically archives all messages in accordance with the Presidential Records Act and other federal laws), and sent others using his "private" account at the RNC.

Rove, in direct contravention to said law, deleted emails from his RNC account. Now caught, he apparently is claiming that he didn't know that deleting emails from his inbox actually got rid of the emails.

Now, we're talking about one of the most computer savvy senior advisors in the administration, the man who almost single handedly invented the "microdemographic" voter analysis approach to winning elections; the man who spends hours pouring over data on his laptop, who by his own admission slices and dices "68 polls a week."

But because email is "technical" and hard for people to understand how it really works, he'll likely get away with this outrageous position.

Let's replace "email" with "documents", and "delete" with "shredding" and see if this still makes sense.

There is a law that says that all papers generated by people working the White House must be preserved. Rather than get thrown away, any notes, memos, etc are taken and stored in an archive, to be opened by historians downstream to help understand what happened and how in this government "of the people."

Karl took lots of notes, wrote lots of informal memos. But he took those notes and memos out of the White House over to the RNC, where no one could copy or store them. Then, when it suited him, he shredded those notes and memos.

Now if you worked for Enron or Arthur Andersen, all this should look very familiar. But those companies don't exist anymore, because their people shredded important documents. And they didn't even have a Presidential Records Act to compel them.

How about we all just say, "Yeah, Rove, Bush, Cheney - all those guys break the law when it suits them. And what can anyone do about it? Nothing."

Or let's impeach. But quit dicking around with it.