Yeah, it's way too important. They tried to subsume democracy to a tyrany. But I turned on the radio mid-morning to hear the tail-end of an NPR article saying something about 5 million e-mails missing, and god knows what else. These guys deliberately kept a lot of the discussion, messenging, etc. off and outside the record.

And since the law is pretty clear about preserving records, people need to be prosecuted. P-R-O-S-E-C-U-T-E-D!

What's wrong with defending democracy?

man-sized safes, shredders

It's the man-sized shredders you want to watch out for...

images of man-sized safes, shredders, and new and creative classified designations cooked up by Dick Cheney's lawyers keep coming to mind.

Not to mention trailors filled with palletized documents en route to some secure location, as Bush did when he left the Governor's mansion in Texas.

It will be interesting to see how cooperative the newly burrowed employees will be in uncovering the skeletons.

The House committees with oversight (forget about Lieberman's Senate Governmental Affairs committee) need to go to court now to get preliminary injunctions against destroying any records. Then they need to announce that they will seek prosecution of and jail time for whoever violates those injunctions, so low-lever staffers had better get written orders from their superiors before they shred a single document.

Sadly, what I actually expect from the Democratic committee chairs are yet more strongly worded letters of protest and then an awkward silence.

Of course it is important to examine the Bush years. But, it also important to examine why there were any Bush years. I still hope against all indications to the contrary that someday someone will write the complete history of what the media did to Gore during campaign 2000 and why our liberal spokesmen virtually stood silent, or in many cases, joined in.

And someone thinks my Democrats have the stones to actually do the right thing?

The Democratic leadership is terminally weak, and worse, seems to have no problem with the actions of the Bush administration. And their weakness may doom the Obama administration.

Can Bush make pardons related to national security classified?

pardons...classified?

Oh wow. Come ta think, you betcha'....

I think the recipient would have to be disclosed, but certainly it's within the repertoire of this admin to claim a national security privelege as to the particulars (if any!) of the pardoned conduct.

Possibly it would be arguable that the recipient could be anonymous, holding his getoutofjailfree card until he needed it, whereupon cases would just go away by virtue of some injunctive process intitiated by an anonymous division of the justice dept.