I read in the WaPo today (Tuesday, July 24) about the White House Political Office conducting briefings for U.S. ambassadors to tell them about the targeted political campaigns. This is a follow-on to the stories about briefings for GSA and FEMA and other agencies, getting them on board to have agencies of the U.S. government subverted for the purposes of furthering the Republican hold on power.
And I just know that the media, and everyone else, is missing the point.
The scandal -- as it is so often in Washington -- is not what was done that was illegal. The scandal is what was done that was legal.
The scandal is not that they went beyond the boundary. The scandal is that they didn't.
The scandal is not the they violated the norms of the Conventional Wisdom. The scandal, again, is that they didn't.
The scandal of this is not that these White House employees went beyond the boundary, and abused their offices. The scandal is that the offices exist.
What I -- and lots of others who won't be heard -- object to is that our tax dollars are paying the inflated salaries of twenty or thirty people to further the partisan interests of the party in power. Of course, Democrats won't see it that way, because when they were in the White House -- and when the expect to be in the White House -- they used and will use the same trough to have the federal government pay people to spend every waking moment thinking of ways to keep their party in power, regardless of the impact of their plans and actions have on the government, and the American people.
The scandal is not that Rove and his minions acted to fire U.S. attorneys who were not loyal to the cause. The scandal is that Rove and his girly-girls were sitting in the White House at all, sending out e-mails and memos on government stationary and networks.
And the scandal is that because these people were working in the White House staff -- instead of on the staff of the Republican National Committee, where they belonged -- we get the comedy of the missing e-mails, and the duplicate accounts, and the laughable claims of executive privilege.
The real answer is too simple to believe: abolish the White House Political Office. Have those people work at the RNC, where they can't claim the authority of the White House.
But that won't happen. For the same reason Bush and Cheney and Gonzales and Rice and the rest will not be impeached or imprisoned. The Democrats will cry with all of us about how the powers the Bush mafia claims have been abused. But they can hardly wait to "properly" use those same powers themselves.
And end up perhaps not as stupid about it, but just as criminal, as the crooks in the White House today.
And the American public? The message is the same from both parties, but Dick Cheney said it best: "Go fuck yourself."