All Those Missing White House documents...

As Litbrit mentioned last night, the White House has admitted: 1. Using a shadow email system set up through the Republican National Committee. 2. Allowing 22 White House officials to maintain email addresses on this system. 3. Possibly some staffers "used the political account to communicate about official White House business." 4. Possibly those email accounts were used to discuss the prosecutor purge. 5. Possibly some of the emails from those external accounts, possibly including the possible emails about the prosecutor purge, were "lost."

Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is neither impressed nor fooled: "This sounds like the administration's version of the dog ate my homework. I am deeply disturbed that just when this Administration is finally subjected to meaningful oversight, it cannot produce the necessary information."

You and me both, Patty.

What remains to be seen is whether ...... whatever incarnation of the I-don't-recall-I-can't-remember-Not-to-my-recollection-It-was-just-an-oversight-It's-not-what-it-looks-like-Oops-we-broke-the-law-but-we-didn't-really-mean-it-we-swear-Can't-produce-the-requested-info-because-it's-lost-Unintentional-Inadvertent-Accidental-Whoopsy-Daisy bullshit excuse is invoked by the administration this time will yet again allow them to weasel their way out of any real consequences.

Fates help us all if it does…

Bush was elected on a wave of apathy plaguing the American populace, which manifested in millions of sighs over the course of the year 2000: There's no difference between the two parties. Bush's then-opponent, Al Gore, has since been proven right about the role internet would come to play in politics, an inevitable healthcare crisis, the need for rigorous diplomacy with Islamic states, alternative fuels' relationship to strengthening national security, his opposition to the Iraq War, and, let us not forget, the concerns about a climate crisis. It is quite possible 9/11 would not have happened on his watch, and it is a certainty the Iraq War would not have happened on his watch. Our national treasury would likely look vastly different, as would nearly every other federal domestic policy.

It's impossible to know precisely what a Gore presidency would look like, but it's safe to say that, whatever it did look like would have a substantially different appearance than Bush's. And that doesn't begin to express how different the current landscape would be had Bush not had a Republican Congress with which to fulfill every last fantastical wet dream of his conservative devotees. That there is no difference between the two parties--or even the men who represented them in a presidential contest seven years ago--is a massive and diabolical myth, perpetuated to the benefit of the extremists who lurked behind the alleged lightweight known as Dubya.

One grand fallacy exposed to a populace still in need of an excuse for their failure of revolution, I fear another is emerging to take its place with a vengeance: We can expect nothing but the worst from our government.

The veracity of this sentiment increases in direct proportion to our collective disinclination to expect the best from our government (but that's a whole other post), and said correlation thusly belies any sense of its intrinsic truth. We absolutely can expect something other than the worst from our government, in spite of shades of this particular sensibility having been around longer than America has been. I daresay it was grumbled by discontents on day two of human history's most rudimentary government--so I'm not hanging the responsibility for this particular brand of ancient distrust on the door of the Bush-occupied White House.

I am, however, intent on holding them accountable for lowering our expectations to an unprecedented fathomage. They've really lowered the bar for what constitutes "the worst" we can expect, and, yet more inimically, lowered the bar for what constitutes "the best." If there's a soul reading this sentence who isn't prepared to hear "Hey--at least it's not the Bush administration!" for the rest of their lives every time the government fucks some shit up, please report to the Shakesville clinic for an injection of much-needed cynicism. And every time I hear it for the rest of my middling days, I will knot my brow into an involuntary frown and feel the clench of my fists as I say through gritted teeth, "We are meant to expect more."