Missing Email Scandal

This is another vague, amorphous "scandal"... ish. But it has shocking ties right into the caging list scandal.

White House staff (and who knows who else) used the Republican National Committee email server to communicate about political machinations.

This is against the Hatch Act, which governs the political vs. public aspects of the White House. The more familiar aspect of the Act is to say that politicians aren't supposed to use their office, their official vehicle, or any other resources of the White House to do political business. For example, if Karl Rove wanted to find out the polling numbers for the GOP in Iowa, he couldn't use his WH email account for that. This keeps those in the administration from wasting government resources on their own re-elections.

But the other side of the Act also dictates that official business can't be done outside the office. While the flip side is about preserving resources, this side is about preserving all documentation about an Administration. Rove can't use his RNC account to discuss amendments to a bill, for example. Doing so would not only violate the Hatch Act, but also allow him to hide presidential records from the National Archives.

Hiding records by using an outside email account goes against the Presidential Records Act, which regulates how all the "paperwork" (in quotes because now it's virtual too, of course) generated by the Administration will be handled. Under the PRA, everything has to be saved until the National Archives says it's OK to throw it out (usually done during the sorting process for the Presidential Library, I suspect).

Which brings us to the next part of this story. When the Congressional committees who were holding hearings on various political machinations of the Administration, they found that when they subpoenaed all the records and emails, many, many were missing. Inquiries revealed that the WH officials and staff had been using the RNC server for both political and policy matters.

Yes, it is true that times have changed. Yes, it's true that not so long ago, no one had ever heard of email. Yes, it's true that those of us with multiple email accounts get confused too. However, emails that have been recovered show this was intentional:

Susan Ralston, who was Karl Rove’s executive assistant, invited two lobbyists working for Jack Abramoff to use her RNC e-mail account to avoid “security issues” with the White House e-mail system, writing: “I now have an RNC blackbeny which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH email.” [ThinkProgress]

However, when Congress attempted to subpoena the emails from the RNC, they had been deleted. Four years worth of emails, approximately 5 million, were missing from the RNC servers. This is yet another assault on the PRA; had the emails been carefully preserved, the WH might have only gotten in trouble over the Hatch Act ("What were the emails doing on the RNC server in the first place?") but in this case, they have effectively destroyed administration records.

Or, are all the emails missing? At least 500 of these emails were victims of yet another mistake, this one for real: the sender typed in "rnc.com" instead of "rnc.org". (In fact much of what we know comes from similar mistakes in addressing.) Fortunately for history, "rnc.com" was a parody site that was owned by a friend of BBC reporter David Palast. As Palast describes in his book, Armed Madhouse, some of the incriminating emails Congress was looking for were in these 500, including the smoking gun of caging lists. Senator John Conyers is now investigating these emails.

UPDATE: While we can't get the MSM to pick up on this story, at least CNN today is finally mentioning that some emails are missing (altho it's buried in their politics page)...

Why it's all so hard

Usually I get an idea for a topic and if I let it germinate, phrases begin to pop into my head, ways of explaining what I'm thinking. Get enough of those and I hit "New Post". Today I confess I'm still germinating, but I'm giving it a stab anyway.

Watching the Congress wrangle back and forth, you start to wonder what is wrong with us. Why can't we move forward on important issues that matter? Why is everything so hard?

First of all, I will point out that since 1994 we have watched a Congress who was controlled by one party, and since 2000 with a neat little Executive Branch to match. So you didn't see wrangling, compromise, politics. Granted, you saw nothing at all except the poor Shiavo family being torn apart by Frist (oh, if my parents didn't read this, what a name I usually call him!) and Delay (who has enough stupid names already). But specifically you didn't see the kind of back-and-forth, I'll-block-you until-you-say you'll-vote-for my-thing, icky-sausage-making that usually constitutes politics. So I'd say we're just not used to this. Also, those of us in the wilderness (that is, not GOP, whatever you are) found voices and politicians that we liked and who said the right things, but they were in the wilderness with us, not in the sausage factory, to mix a metaphor. Like a candidate with no experience, it's easy to rally behind people until they get down to the real work of politics. As soon as they walk into that sausage factory we call a government, we don't like what we see as much.

But more than that, it's been especially hard to watch the wrangling this time, and this time, the wrangling itself seems harder. I think it's because the politics go as politics go-- you don't have enough votes to pass something, you stick something on it to sweeten it, like a minium wage increase-- but the issues are suddenly so dire.

Let's say for example that all this wrangling and vetoes and everything we've seen regarding the Iraq supplemental was instead about No Child Left Behind. I don't like NCLB, but if the GOP said, wait until September, let's see if our surge (let's say in this case, of teachers or money) has any results, I'd be OK with that. Or let's say he needs to reauthorize the money for NCLB, but the opposition doesn't want to. They pass a bill that gives him the money but says that each school must show a 10% improvement by next spring. He vetoes it. They come back with another version, this time without the timelines, and he passes it, all the while saying, just give me until September, let's see how summer school went, let's see if the kids' test scores are up by the fall.

Well, you know what, I'd be fine with that. Politically speaking, to compromise and say, "OK, we won't shove this down your throat, we'll give you three more months to try to make it work, because we all want it to work, we all want what's best, we can compromise on that," is perfectly reasonable, and probably wise. Let his surge of teachers fail, as it will because that isn't the problem, and then we can move on.

The only problem is, when we took off on Monday to honor our war dead, eight more soldiers were added to that list. I don't know how you calculate averages on such a thing, but at that rate, 720 more American men and women would DIE before we "check in" in September to "see how it's going", and an untold number of Iraqis as well.

There's nothing really wrong with the way politicians are going about this, because like in our NCLB example, compromise and allowing other ideas to be tried is what politics are all about. And for those like Ted Kennedy or Orrin Hatch, politicians who have been around for a long time, this is how they are used to operating. I don't think blame should be assigned for that.

The real reason it's so hard is that we don't have another system set up to deal with the dire realities. This one is fine for arguing about education or immigration, but not so good for war. Congress, particularly the Senate, is meant to be slow and deliberative. Slow and deliberative are killing us, literally, in this context. We need an Express Lane for Congress. Oh, wait, we had one, it was called "one party rule". Things went by fast, but they also suffered from groupthink and Bush-worship, and the decisions made were awful. So maybe slow and deliberative is good, even in war?

Perhaps. But it's hard to look into the eyes of the parents and families of soldiers and say that.

I gotta run, I hope I did this topic some service. Please feel free to comment!

"I voted against the surge before I voted for it."

This is the only reason for the non-binding resolution: so that later on when everyone's running for office again they can say that they voted against the surge before they voted for spending the money on it.

The next thing that will happen, after the Pres ignores the Congress' resolution and goes on with his surge plan, is that he will ask Congress for the money to pay for it. These politians know that if they vote against the money (the infamous "power of the purse") they will be branded as "anti-military" and "not supporting the troops". The power of the purse may be what the Framers intended for Congress to wield, but it is political suicide when applied to military concerns.

So the only way out is to first pass the "We don't like the surge" bill and then pass the spending bill, and when asked on the campaign trail in a couple of years they can say,

(everybody sing along now)

"I voted against the surge before I voted for it."

Very good.

Lila

I've been reading Lila, Robert Pirsig's sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While not a political book, the main thrust of the philosophy gave me the language to address the Foley situation, so I wanted to share it with you.

If you've read Zen, or know someone who has, you might well imagine the mired depths of the philosophy in Lila. Like the Prez once said about his job, "It's hard." I'm going to try to break it down in as few sentences as possible.

There are three main systems in the human condition: biological, social, and intellectual.

Biology came first, obviously: before there were towns or clans, there were people. And the biological system carries great weight; in Lila, there is a humorous description of the narrator's "biology" taking over his "intellect" as it shuts him down for sleep. "Tomorrow [his cells] would need him when they got hungry, and they would turn him on to find some food..." He compares this to a computer, that biology is the hardware while the other systems, such as intellect, are the software that runs on it.

Biology is also our impulses, such as sex and eating, as well as crime, consumerism, dancing, and so on. It is what our bodies want, despite our intellect. Many of these biological impulses are good for the hardware: eating and sleeping, for example. My mother once said of sex, "If it was as boring as brushing your teeth, no one would do it and there wouldn't be babies." Sex in fact might be one of the highest biological systems because it perpetuates the body into another body. One might also think of biology as the "wild" part of ourselves, the part that wants to gambol and gamble, fight and take flight. Take away society's mores, take away the intellect's reasoned choices, and what is left is biology.

Biology run rampant in a group of people is of course anarchy. So as people began to band together, they created society to control the biology. You just can't go around killing people. Your biology might impel you to do so, but society steps in and says you can't, and puts you in jail. Laws are created to control biology.

But society can run rampant too. Pirsig uses the Victorian society as an example of society with too much control, which led to repression. (Pirsig absolves them however by asserting that all they were doing was saying Society is more important than the Individual, and putting the good of society above all else. Not a sin, just a difference of priority.) Taking it farther, the Nazis and other totalitarian society systems exert(ed) total control over the individual. This clearly can't stand any more than anarchy.

The last system is intellect. Intellect, the system of the free-thinking mind, looks for example at the Victorians and asks, "Why?" Why are these rules the way they are? Why can't I live how I want? Who died and made you the boss of me? And so come the Bohemians, the Beatniks, the Hippies, and the Slackers. Each group is a group of "contrarian" (Pirsig's word) intellectuals reacting to the repression of their societies, and asking "Why?" This is why totalitarian systems tend to jail dissidents and intellectuals-- the intellect is a threat to a society that says, "Don't question, obey."

Intellect is there to control society by making sure that it doesn't go haywire. The Great Writ of Habeas Corpus is one example-- an idea created to keep society from locking up your biology for no reason. The Constitution is a intellectual endeavor to create a society and give it functions and limitations over the biological system of the People.

The systems are dependent on each other, but Pirsig also puts them in a hierarchy of control: society is there to control biology, and intellect is there to control society. (And of course without biology, no people, no society or intellect-- it's kind of like rock-paper-scissors.) Biology will, without society, turn naturally to anarchy. Society will, without intellect to guide it, turn naturally to totalitarianism as the epitome of society's control. Intellect will forget to eat if biology doesn't rumble the tummy. Everybody has a job.

Here is the crux of the matter, and the reason this philosophy applies to how I'm feeling about politics these days.

Rep. Foley acted on his Biology (in this case, a deviant biological impulse). That's the first bad thing that happened.

But Society, in the form of the Republican leadership, failed to control Foley. Both as the management of the system of society called Congress, and as the management of our system of society called The USA, they failed to stop and correct the deviant biology that sprung up in their midst and threatened young members of the society.

Biology will out, they say-- I had a boss tell me once, "Every employee will try to get away with whatever they can, including you. It's their nature. It's up to you as a manager to rein them in, and it's my job to rein you in." Yes, Foley did something bad. But the society that fails to correct biology is even more at fault, because they weren't fighting the fog of biological impulses in Foley's head like he was. It was their job to rein him in, and they failed.

The Republican-controlled society has also tried to control intellect by secrecy (just don't let the Intellect know what's going on), and by squashing dissent. If you think of our Society as an entity, its imperative is to rise to dominance. It is therefore the fault of Intellect (philosophers, ethicists, dissidents, Democrats) that we have not made any inroads in controlling this Society. It is our job to rein them in. It's our job to defend Habeas Corpus, to curtail the domestic spying program, to correct our foreign policy. If Intellect fails to step in and parent Society, we are doomed to totalitarianism.

Maya Angelou said after 9/11, "Now is the time for thinkers to think." It was at our own peril that we ignored that admonition.

Well, sometimes you read something and it's so clear to you-- and then sometimes you read Pirsig. (Joke.) What I mean is, sometimes an idea can be clear and you wish you could tell more people about it. I hope that I made some sense. I'd love to hear comments on this!