The future is now
The Sky returns from a spell of computer trouble. We're feeling much better and have a lot to catch up. Are you sitting comfortably?
Clearly I'm no expert in these clever little machines and how they work, but over the past eight years I have managed to learn a few things. For instance, aging Dell laptops hate to get wet, and anything you send into cyberspace will hang there forever like dust from an ancient supernova.
So why can't the doublesmart people who run the world figure this out? First there was Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert/Joe Ramrod or whatever his name was. We thought he was just another online reporter who could be counted on to toss nerfball questions at White House press conferences. Then someone came across the website where he offered his paid services to other, presumably conservative men ("Top only!") and he became an embarrassment to a White House which also contains an Office of Faith-Based Yaddayadda and condemns his sideline as an Old Testament abomination. Apparently Jeff/Jim thought nobody would match up his face on C-SPAN with his genital display online. Another journalistic career fell victim to liberal hypocrisy (according to Jim).
Then there was Mark Foley, who didn't exactly cost the Republicans the House but certainly didn't help. Did it never occur to him that the pages would keep his pathetically horny text messages, not for legal reasons but just to amuse one another? ("Check it out -- the old guy says he rubbed one off during State of the Union!") The words don't vanish when you turn off the phone, Mark, like the little people on the TV screen. Just because there's no actual paper, it doesn't mean there's no paper trail. How are you enjoying your retirement?
And all the while, Karl Rove and Kyle Sampson (he's the one who looks like a depraved Radar O'Reilly) were busily exchanging e-mail about which US attorneys could be counted on to stay the course and smear the opposition, and which were obstinately devoted to law enforcement. The last time there was a Justice Department this sleazy, let me see now, it was just about 34 years ago. How time flies. We couldn't believe that all sorts of people including the President would allow themselves to be taped discussing the feasibility of various criminal enterprises intended to cover up other criminal enterprises. At least with tape, you can claim the transcriber misheard you, or accidentally erased a particularly damning passage, or couldn't have seen the ironic lift of your eyebrow as you said, "Perjury is a very hard rap to prove." By exchanging e-mail, the heirs to Nixon and Mitchell and their co-conspirators have created their own transcriptions. (Luckily for Bush, he only uses a computer to play solitaire and find his ranch with The Google. Ignorance can be your friend.)
Just for laughs, there was another right-wing rent boy named Matt Sanchez who learned nothing from Gannon-gate and has a cherishable picture of himself with Ann Coulter to prove it. In a slower news cycle he'd be a bigger topic, but there's just so much going on...Sanchez, who is way hotter than Gannon but not much smarter, protested at this biased liberal invasion of his privacy, something he probably should have considered before starring in all-boy porn. And having violated "don't ask-don't tell" so spectacularly, he may encounter difficulties as a reservist in the Marines. I hope he at least gets a movie out of this. With Taye Diggs, maybe.
Now listen up: Just because you figure out a way to put your hard-drive through some nuclear powered shredder (oh, yes, they have them at the Pentagon) doesn't mean you've made the data go away. It's out there, somewhere, and it will bite you on the front pages, now that the Democrats have remembered how to spell subpoena duces tecum. Count on it.
Clearly I'm no expert in these clever little machines and how they work, but over the past eight years I have managed to learn a few things. For instance, aging Dell laptops hate to get wet, and anything you send into cyberspace will hang there forever like dust from an ancient supernova.
So why can't the doublesmart people who run the world figure this out? First there was Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert/Joe Ramrod or whatever his name was. We thought he was just another online reporter who could be counted on to toss nerfball questions at White House press conferences. Then someone came across the website where he offered his paid services to other, presumably conservative men ("Top only!") and he became an embarrassment to a White House which also contains an Office of Faith-Based Yaddayadda and condemns his sideline as an Old Testament abomination. Apparently Jeff/Jim thought nobody would match up his face on C-SPAN with his genital display online. Another journalistic career fell victim to liberal hypocrisy (according to Jim).
Then there was Mark Foley, who didn't exactly cost the Republicans the House but certainly didn't help. Did it never occur to him that the pages would keep his pathetically horny text messages, not for legal reasons but just to amuse one another? ("Check it out -- the old guy says he rubbed one off during State of the Union!") The words don't vanish when you turn off the phone, Mark, like the little people on the TV screen. Just because there's no actual paper, it doesn't mean there's no paper trail. How are you enjoying your retirement?
And all the while, Karl Rove and Kyle Sampson (he's the one who looks like a depraved Radar O'Reilly) were busily exchanging e-mail about which US attorneys could be counted on to stay the course and smear the opposition, and which were obstinately devoted to law enforcement. The last time there was a Justice Department this sleazy, let me see now, it was just about 34 years ago. How time flies. We couldn't believe that all sorts of people including the President would allow themselves to be taped discussing the feasibility of various criminal enterprises intended to cover up other criminal enterprises. At least with tape, you can claim the transcriber misheard you, or accidentally erased a particularly damning passage, or couldn't have seen the ironic lift of your eyebrow as you said, "Perjury is a very hard rap to prove." By exchanging e-mail, the heirs to Nixon and Mitchell and their co-conspirators have created their own transcriptions. (Luckily for Bush, he only uses a computer to play solitaire and find his ranch with The Google. Ignorance can be your friend.)
Just for laughs, there was another right-wing rent boy named Matt Sanchez who learned nothing from Gannon-gate and has a cherishable picture of himself with Ann Coulter to prove it. In a slower news cycle he'd be a bigger topic, but there's just so much going on...Sanchez, who is way hotter than Gannon but not much smarter, protested at this biased liberal invasion of his privacy, something he probably should have considered before starring in all-boy porn. And having violated "don't ask-don't tell" so spectacularly, he may encounter difficulties as a reservist in the Marines. I hope he at least gets a movie out of this. With Taye Diggs, maybe.
Now listen up: Just because you figure out a way to put your hard-drive through some nuclear powered shredder (oh, yes, they have them at the Pentagon) doesn't mean you've made the data go away. It's out there, somewhere, and it will bite you on the front pages, now that the Democrats have remembered how to spell subpoena duces tecum. Count on it.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 3:03 PM
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