Oopsies! Hillary's passport files breached too. And McCain's. How about Rockefeller's?

Well, gosh! The oh-so-terribly accident prone Bush-Cheney "administration" has its nose in Hillary Clinton's passport files, too. What a shocker!

Thousands of -- oops! -- illegally issued National Security Letters. The FBI accidentally vacuuming up a whole company's e-mails instead of just a targeted person's. The continuing nightmare of the no-fly list. And now the breach of the passport files of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Oh, and John McCain's.

Yes, I said Hillary Clinton. Not Bill Clinton. George H.W. Bush's State Department already rifled that file in 1992. But gosh, what a coincidence!

What an amazing development, eh? George H.W. Bush's State Department sticks their nose into Bill Clinton's passport file, but the "responsible" official resigns, and nothing ever comes of it. Lesson learned? Sure! Now George W. Bush's State Department is free to stick its nose into Hillary Clinton's files. Plus anyone else it feels like poking around on. And like almost everything that happens around Condoleezza Rice, no one could have foreseen it!

Dangerous domestic spying? Or just imprudent use of a new class of massive, all-encompassing, Total Information Awareness-style databases by unnamed and unidentifiable "outside contractors" and "low-level employees?" Who knows?

And does it really make a difference? So long as a government official in a proper-looking suit tells reporters -- from behind a proper-looking podium with a proper-looking seal on it and proper-looking blue draperies behind -- that it's "been taken care of," though they can't tell you the names of the employees (confidentiality, you know) or the name of the contractor (national security, you know), then everything's just find and dandy, right?

Besides, it's just another opportunity for Republicans to point out how "Big Government" doesn't work. Just look! We can't make it work, either! And if that contractor was a government employee, Teh UnionZ would make it impossible for us to fire him. So really, this breach was a terrific way for us to demonstrate that outsourcing really works! Sure, we had to let someone totally unvetted and totally untrustworthy access sensitive personal information about our opposition's top political leaders to prove it, but prove it we did! After all, we just announced that this unverifiable person was unverifiably fired. What more proof of our dedication to security and freedom could you want?

Now, just because it's happened before and there have been no consequences -- beyond perhaps having to tell a Congressional committee you "can't recall" anything about it -- doesn't necessarily mean it'll happen again, right? After all, didn't the vigorous investigation into illegal political operations at the GSA set things right? Well, I don't know. You tell me. Fifteen other agencies turned out to have held the same briefings and instructions on how to help Republican candidates, and the Education Department is back at it even today, on behalf of Norm Coleman.

Hearings and Sternly Worded Letters^TM don't mean squat to these people. It used to be the Republican mantra that anything goes except getting caught. But eventually they came to realize that getting caught wasn't the real issue. It was getting punished that was worth worrying about. At least until the president commutes your sentence, retroactively immunizes you, exempts you from the law, or otherwise laughs off punishment, anyway.

Of course, in the case of the passport files, there's now the added layer of obfuscation created by having contracted this State Department work out. "It wasn't us! It was the outside contractors!"

True? Maybe.

But how does it make you feel about the prospects of the Bush-Cheney "administration" treating the supposed limits written into Sen. Jay Rockefeller's proposed free pass for domestic spying, for instance?

"Oh, it wasn't us snooping in the phone and e-mail records of the Democratic nominee's campaign. No, no! It was... ummm, a low-level contract worker for one of the telecoms we gave immunity to! Yeah, that's the ticket! Now move along, nothing to see here."

But of course, we'll be conducting vigorous oversight to prevent look into these things after the fact, so all's well, right? Henry Waxman, for instance, has already issued a Sternly Worded Letter^TM. Let's hope Condi doesn't decide she's "not inclined" to answer this time.

If she does answer, it now seems clear that we're going to have to have a list of names, and ask individually whether those files have been breached, since that's apparently what it takes to get the State Department to fess up to the snooping taking place on Condi's watch. Here's a list I'd be curious about: Senators Baucus, Bayh, Carper, Casey, Conrad, Inouye, Johnson, Kohl, Landrieu, Lieberman, Lincoln, McCaskill, Mikulski, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Webb and Whitehouse. Have any of those files been breached?

Why? Well, maybe I've taken things a little bit far afield here, but let me just take the opportunity to ask Senator Rockefeller and his 19 Democratic Senate colleagues who voted for his FISA abomination this: Still think it's safe to trust this "administration" with properly guarding sensitive, private information? Still think everything's gonna be just fine with immunizing the private contractors who are supposed to be partners with the government in handling this stuff responsibly?

Will, "Oops! Well, we'll fire some low-level contractors" really be a sufficient trade-off for turning the Fourth Amendment inside-out, and granting unprecedented snooping powers to people so demonstrably irresponsible with it?

Seriously, Senators. You can't possibly be this stupid. Do they really have to literally be in your skivvies before you get a clue?