I love this kind of stuff. The Wall Street Journal is dismissed out of hand, but Slate is holy writ.
Your attempt at tu quoque didn’t work too well, and this isn’t much better.
Clinton had eight years to do something, and didn’t. Bush had eight months, and didn’t.
Therefore it’s Bush’s fault.
I guess that means that if Kerry wins, anything that happens between November 5, 2004, and May 20, 2005 is his fault. I’ll keep that in mind. 
Regards,
Shodan
The missing documents/files will turn up mysteriously, just like the ROSE LAW FIRM billing records(that Hillary Clinton couldn’t find) turned up in a White House desk! This is like a rerun of the Clinton years, stuff goes missing, nobody remembers, then…a discovery!
I hope this Burger is prosecuted for theft of secret documnts…a few years in the Fedreal pen seems in order!
The WSJ editorial page. Are you seriously claiming that the unsigned editorial page, notorious for utterly bogus information, outright lies, and wild conspiracy theories, is more trustworthy than someone like Fred Kaplan, or is this another albatross attack?
As things stand, all the juicy details all seem to be coming from a single anonymous source who is leaking like crazy what he heard from another anonymous source, apparently to try to keep this in the news even though there are no new developments, it’s a year old, and while Bush describes it as a serious matter, the FBI doesn’t seem to agree.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-07-21-bush-berger_x.htm
The details of the juicier story, in retrospect, don’t seem to make a lot of sense: given that people in the archives are litterally watched 100% of the time they are in there with documents, its hard to see how Berger could have thought he was safe to “stuff things into his socks.”
Meanwhile, Bush has released a statement on the issue that seems itself a little oddball:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040722/pl_afp/us_vote_attacks_berger&cid=1521&ncid=1963&sid=96378801
So, the Justice Department will fully investigate the matter? Good to know they’re on the case! Except…
a) they’ve already been on the case for a year
b) Bush and, inexplicably, his political team, knew about this case long before now:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/politics/22berger.html?hp
That means that, along with their surprise and shock about Clarkes’ book, and Bush’s surprise and shock about interviewer questions, they are completely faking their surprise and shock. Bush declares that the Justice Department will fully investigate (even though it already has and has basically concluded any real work months ago) only when the story hits the press, not when he finds out about it? This means that he’s acting like national security threats only exist when a) the threat is made public and/or b) he and his people are desperate and things are looking pretty bad for them.
But Apos, in a Liberal Media[sup]TM[/sup], the only way the Truth[sup]TM[/sup] can get out is on the editorial pages and commentary radio. See?
Right, and can’t you just imagine the screeching and howling that would have emanated from the left, had Reagan’s national security advisor been caught purlioning classified documents from the National Archives while an investigation into the so-called “October surprise” was taking place?
No, the Left would be singing quite a different tune than they are now. Kinda like the different tune that they would have sung had Bush been caught bangin’ the headboards with a twenty-one year old intern. You can bet your last dollar that you wouldn’t have heard a damn thing about the President’s private life.
Ever notice how often the Left hides behind the double-standard?
I’ll let some patient soul address the rest of your ‘misrepresentations’, but as to the above:
Cite.
Yeah, I read Drudge too Brutus: it does now seem that Berger bent the rules on monitoring. Though I’d like to know what the other misrepresentations are. Is it not true that Bush knew about this long before now? Is it not true that FBI doesn’t think this is a particularly serious matter?
Who is this senior law enforcement source though? Is it all the same guy continually leaking more and more stuff to everyone in town?
We’ll get right on that investigation, don’t you worry. [tick, tock, tick, tock] Yep, any second now…
Does it matter? Berger hasn’t denied taking the files. He hasn’t denied breaking the law, though he’s trying to characterize it as a “technical” violation.
It seems that your complaint is that this lawbreaking wasn’t kept hidden, Apos. That’s a mighty curious position to take.
Jesus.
Okay, let’s do this Rumsfeld style. Watch me for the changes, and try and keep up.
Was Berger wrong to take the classified material? Yes.
Should he be reasonably punished for this? Yes.
Is there any evidence that it was nefarious rather than a simple screw-up? No.
Does this incident appear fairly benign compared to the security and intelligence shenanigans of the Bush administration. Yes.
It would be more frustrating to witness the hissy fit y’all are throwing for our benefit if it wasn’t clearly indicative of desperation on your parts. That makes it pretty darn entertaining, in all honesty. Evidence of this is the truly poor attempt to draw Ken Starr era allegations into the picture.
Keep on dancing, though. I might be moved to toss a quarter in your hat.
I agree on both points.
You might not want to commit too strongly to that one, **Hentor. From today’s Washington Post
It’s pretty clear to most observers that Berger was homing in on those documents and doing whatever he could to get them out of the Archives. It’s looking less and less like a screw-up every day.
Even if this is indeed the case, so what? I can’t go into court for my traffic tickets and expect to be let off because some other guy committed murder.
Sandy Beger has to answer for his own actions, independent of what others do or have done.
The point isn’t that you should be let off on the traffic tickets as you disingenuously claim, it’s that you shouldn’t appear in the front page headlines while the murderer gets one paragraph on page 12.
I am completely comfortable committing to that one along with all the others. You’re from the Burgh, right? I’ll put up a case of Iron City or Penn Pilsner or even some Yuengling on it.
But ask yourself why it’s looking any different from day to day. It is a story that is a year old! What is changing appears to me to be the versions told by the anonymous source(s). Is it still the case that he stuck stuff in his socks? Does common sense tell you that he would be so closely scrutinized and yet wander out with the stuff he did? What does the source mean by coded? How did he have both “coded” papers yet also single copy originals? Has his security privilege been revoked? If so, when?
But you and I already came to agreement on points one and two. Why are you reneging? Are you one of those flip-floppers?!!?!
You keep coming back to this point without doing the necessary follow-up. Yes, Berger was coming back for a lot of documents. But why would he have thought that he could accomplish anything more sinister than reading them at home even if it was intentional? The documents had already been read, written, and seen by people all over Washington. Their contents were well known and widely discussed.
You’ll notice that it’s the Democrats filing for a FoIA on this one, not the Republicans. Are they trying to dig up dirt on themselves by uncovering whatever Berger was supposedly covering up?
Also, given that all of the juicy information is coming from, apparently one anonymous source who’s leaking often and everywhere, are we getting the whole story? As Kevin Drum asks:
We are meant to believe, at the same time, that a) what he did was an incredibly serious breach of our national security, and b) that the people in charge of preventing these breaches knowingly let it go on, didn’t do anything to stop it as it happened, and basically treated it like a guy stealing a pack of gum from a concession stand? Sounds to me like we’re missing some elements of this story.
Because they wanted to nail his North Korean communist masters too. :dubious:
I didn’t say that it was Bush’s fault. Rather, I was responding to this statement from Razorsharp: “Clinton let Osama off the hook. Clinton is more responbsible than Dubya for 9-11.”
What I said is that one can hardly blame Clinton given that 8 months is plenty of time to reverse a policy one believes is misplaced. (Hell, GW Bush didn’t waste time freezing a lot of Clinton’s environmental regs that he didn’t like.) And, in fact, Richard Clarke will tell you that the change in policy that was made was to place less emphasis on terrorism and Al Qaeda.
The fact is, as I said (and I noticed the 9/11 Commission said too), there was not the public will to take dramatic action against Al Qaeda before 9/11. So, neither Clinton nor Bush did…although Clinton seemed to have it on his “radar screen” more than Bush did.
Considering that John Kerry will not be sworn in as president until January 20, 2005, blaming him for events that happen after November 5, 2004 is really, really illogical. And BTW, if President Kerry receives a PDB in July 2005 warning of an imminent Al-Queda attack and decides to go on a month-long vacation, resulting in a horrible attack on our nation in September 2005, then yes, I will place 100% of the blame on the incompetent President Kerry.
This story is Rashomon told by a schizo speed freak.
The papers
Are copies
Are copies and notes
Are copies notes and authentic documents
inadvertently intermingled by a notoriously sloppy guy
maybe purposely intermingled
and inadvertently stuffed into a briefcase
absentmindedly stuffed into his coat pocket
cunningly secreted in his stockings
repulsively crammed up his Nixon
the documents are crucial pieces of strategic data, invaluable to our enemies
the documents are notes of meetings, which reveal the weakness of Clinton admin. thinking on terrorism
which would be bad for the Demos because it would deprive them of number 26 of the Top Fifty Talking Points
we don’t know what the documents are, we only know they are secret, and stuff that is really, really important is marked secret, so they might be very important!
The staff at the archives are clueless.
The staff was well aware, and invented “codes” for the documents so that they could track the crime in progress, perhaps under supervision from the FBI, who encourage amateur investigations.
The staff was suspicious because Berger returned stuff he shouldn’t have. They took a meeting and pondered the implications, deciding at length that if he were returing them, he must have had them. If he had them, they were gone. They were not supposed to be gone. Then they went to lunch…
The FBI took months to investigate this because the were tracking down all the potential implications: all the known connections between Berger and bin Laden, for instance… They were also monitoring the behavior and strategy of Al Queda to see what effect this revelation of Clinton administration vulnerabilities would have.
The FBI took months investigating this because nobody gave a rat’s patoot about it, but they liked keeping it around to give to rookies as a “hazing” stunt, it becomes known as “serving the new kid a sandy burger”. Hilarity ensues.
I’ve heard about eleventy seven sworn versions of God’s own truth, and now even my preconceptions are confused. I can’t even remember which bias I approached this with.
But there must be some facts, mustn’t there? That is the nature of reality, right, some things are true, the rest are not.
Can we get some facts just on the documents, just for starters? It was suggested, for instance, that scenario 3© above is the one, Berger was seeking to remove all traces of an embarassing event in the Clinton admin, cause it would destroy Kerry’s campaign, or un-embarass Bush, or just because.
Then someone else equally authoritative tells me that all the documents are recorded and “archived” and none of them are gone, and even if they were, everybody’s already read them all anyway and already thoroughly discussed everything Berger might have been hiding…
No, no, we have no idea what the documents were, they could be anything, they could be vitally important to national security…
So the documents are the McGuffin here. Nail that down, and everything will fall into place. The wind up, the pitch… Can anybody tell me, with any real solid authority, just what, exactly, those goddam furshlugginer documents were!
Being that they were classified, I should hope not, exept in the vaguest of senses.
As an aside, is ol’ Sandy a vital part of your plan to do whatever? I am a bit perplexed at the amazing contortions the ‘loyal opposition’ is going through in the keystone cop-esque effort to defend him.
Fact: Sandy did something he should not have done.
End of story. Why he did it is still up for grabs. The quibbling details of what he did are up for grabs. (But due to the ‘classified’ nature, we will almost certainly never know the details.)
But the fact remains. Sandy screwed the pooch, amazing rhetorical backflips from his loyal legions (and I bet he didn’t even know he had them!) notwithstanding.