What Leahy ought to have added, before insisting that Mueller find out the answer to his question, was a little situational detail, perhaps as follows:

"Mr. Mueller, you are the director of the FBI, and yesterday were asked these same questions before the U.S. House of Representatives, and yet today you appear before the United States Senate, as embarrassingly unprepared for this important hearing as you were yesterday. What, exactly, did you and your hundreds of employees DO last night? Was there something good on television? No witness, no employee, and indeed no American would ever approach his job with such insouciant laxity. Do you think that the American Government, and the taxpayers who support it, are being respected and served to the best of your ability?

Please explain what could have been more important last night than preparing for this hearing, as many hard-working Americans who arrived at work prepared each day would like to know."

Mueller is an incompetent, worthless political hack, as anyone who bothered to read his book, humbly titled, "My FBI," could plainly see. It was one of the most vindictive, self-serving, and lie-filled revisionist autobiographies to roll out of Washington in the past few years, and that's saying something.

I have begun measuring the wider impact of UT postings by how many one-hit wonder trolls are drawn, early and often, to the comments, always saying the exact same things, with only differing degrees of authoritarian craziness to distinguish them.

Palin, for whatever reason, seems to have some magical quality, or at least some very nervous puppetmasters, in that she seems to bring out the most entertaining bridge-dwellers.

Of course, subjects that involve the necessity of police state surveillance is also a reliable Troll-bait, always good for some scary insights into the authoritarian mind.

Today's post, wonder of wonders, has both!

I think I'll pour another cup of coffee (the last one got sprayed all over...) and go in a bit late to work

Sarah Palin is a public official, under investigation in her home state for abuse of power, by a bipartisan legislative commission. She has used private email accounts, just as the White House has, to evade public scrutiny.

Now that she is a Vice Presidential candidate, the McCain camp has sent an army of lawyers, "investigators," and army-twisters to meddle in that state's affairs.

During this process, an anonymous hacker was able to access her "private" emails, of fairly innocuous but decidedly unimpressive content, and now the righties are all worried about her "privacy."

Suddenly, this action, which no one here or elsewhere has either endorsed or condoned, is directly linked to the Obama campaign, and righteous calls are now made for every non-Republican on the face of the earth to reveal their private correspondence. It's mind-boggling, but in a rather hilarious way....

I'd be curious to know if they were so jealously protective of Clinton's "privacy," back in the day.

After an early blizzard of similar postings by righty trolls, evidently accompanied by a similar blizzard in Glenn's emails, suddenly the crickets are chirping again. Maybe they've all been sent to shower their "insight" on some other anti-american-terrorist-homo- baby killer, or perhaps around now they have to submit their work for their checks from the RNC.

The next hacker should try to hack into the "new accounts" sections at left-leaning websites, or better yet, the checking account of the RNC, which must be issuing a lot of small (I hope!) checks about now.

I may be getting into tinfoil turban territory here, but the disturbing unanimity of their grievances, and the suddenness of their appearance and subsequent disappearance, raises all sorts of red flags. On some level, it makes me wonder whether McCain is just faking it about his intertubes cluelessness, and perhaps not only invented the Blackberry, but is handing them out to mouth-breathing ne'er do wells by the hundreds, with preprogrammed talking points churning out on an hourly basis.

The campaign's clear and strange obsession with sanctifying Palin, to the degree that they've dispatched a legal armada to Alaska to quash the seemingly trivial "Troopergate" investigation, leads me to wonder why this is so important to them. Obviously, they are trying to paint Palin as a victim, relentlessly and maniacally, but at the same time are going so over the top with their preemptive offense against a piddly little Investigation in Alaska, that there must be something more here. The (Bush-appointed) lawyer from the US Attorney's office in NY has been dispatched, for Christ's sake, and is busily spouting (false, naturally enough) talking points and making mischief up there 24/7. Given the well-known politicization of USA's, and the fact that this one was formerly working on "Counter-terrorism," leads me to believe that even the Bush Administration may be involved.

Talk about going after a mosquito with a sledge hammer.

Now, we have at least three bizarrely extreme disproportionate responses to criticism of Palin rolled out and going at once.

1) Massive mobilization of astroturf internet stooges.

2) Huge, overqualified legal (and not so legal) assault on Alaska's legislative investigation.

3) Coordinated, preemptive, and even more vehement than usual discrediting of the "liberal Media."

3) (a) Possible fake victim narrative and innocuous but politically useful leak, which looks (h/t Glenn) 49-51 at this point?

What, indeed, does Palin, or more disturbingly, McCain and Bush/Cheney have to hide?