Michael Birk:

Gee, where have I heard that before? Hmmm, how about every week for the past year (at least)

Maybe s/he gets paid by the word?

Extending your word count is easy! For example, instead of saying:

I feel -- in this vaguely intuitive sort of way --

you say:

I feel -- in this very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very vaguely intuitive sort of way --

See? Word count doubled. :-)

http://archive.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/03/17/wolfowitz_nomination

Mr. Magoo goes to the World Bank
The problem with Paul Wolfowitz isn't that he's an evil genius. It's that he has been consistently, astonishingly, unswervingly wrong about foreign policy for 30 years.
By Michael Lind
March 17, 2005
. . . Like the myopic cartoon character, Wolfowitz stumbles onward blindly and serenely, leaving wreckage and confusion behind. Critics are wrong to portray Wolfowitz as a malevolent genius. In fact, he's friendly, soft-spoken, well meaning and thoughtful. He would be the model of a scholar and a statesman but for one fact: He is completely inept. . .
. . . In military matters, this deputy secretary of defense displayed a level of ignorance without precedent in the history of civilian appointees to the Pentagon. (Even Robert McNamara's much-maligned "whiz kids" got some things right.) During the Clinton years Wolfowitz peddled the fantasy that American-supported rebels in Iraq could set up a base camp in one region and proceed to depose Saddam with minimal U.S. involvement. With the Bay of Pigs fiasco in mind, Gen. Anthony Zinni described this as the "Bay of Goats" strategy. . . .

I dunno. I think Mister Magoo was way funnier.

Arne wrote:

echo "<CTL-V>" | wc -w

Sorry to pick nits, but this will almost certainly fail due to quotation marks (and other "special" characters that musts be "escaped") contained in the article. Might I suggest an alternative:

wc -w<ENTER><CTRL-V><CTRL-D>

(Note: This is for Unix/Linux systems, or Windows/Mac systems with a Unix compatibility layer such as Cygwin.)

No worries, escaping bugs are one of the most common errors out there. For example, both Salon.com and Blogger.com have a bug which will screw up your comment, by unescaping HTML entitities such as &amp; when you preview your post! (The solution is to copy, preview, paste, and then post.)

And they are the underlying source of the so-called "Cross-Site Scripting" security holes. Even languages like C and C++ are vulnerable (through the printf family of routines).

If incompetence in a cover up is an excuse then the Bush administration has got excuses coming out of their butts.

Your statement-This "he destroyed documents" crapola is just more RW fiction... is contradicted by your own post -- The investigation concluded that no original documents were missing or destroyed.

Berger definitely stole and destroyed documents related to the 9/11 investigation.

Your contention that no original documents were destroyed is contradicted by the staff report of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform dated January 9, 2007.

http://republicans.oversight.house.gov/Media/PDFs/BergerReport010907.pdf

- The public statements of the former chief of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, Noel Hillman, were incomplete and misleading. Because Berger had access to original documents on May 30, 2002, and July 18, 2003, there is no basis for his statement that "nothing was lost to the public or the process."

- The 9/11 Commission relied on assurances from the Department of Justice that a full and complete production was made, and that no original or any other responsive documents were withheld. No one told the 9/11 Commission that Berger had access to original documents...

The Berger episode makes both republican and democrats head's explode. We have the Bush Justice Department helping to cover up and minimize the destruction of 9/11 documents by Clinton's National Security Advisor.

Good times. At the very least, partisans certainly deserve each other.

It's just too difficult for Republicans to let go of Clinton...

Even if it's vicariously through his cabinet members.

Citing anything with "Republicans" and "oversight" is too easy, and betrays your whole point.

But, thanks for playing. Maybe you can bring up Pat Roberts "investigations" as well, next time.

Again, a simple question:

What kind of criminal penalties are possible if indeed its found the White House staff deliberately destroyed records and recordings they were directed to preserve?

Fines? Jail time? How much of either/both?

But possibly amusing.

I was just trolling on Redstate.com... the stupid, it burns!... anyway, in the midst of a thread on how awful it is that people are demanding the e-mails of White House staffers!, a commenter links back to this blog post, and is immediately called to task for linking to a "hate site."

Somebody more verbally agile than I am, please make whatever joke is appropriate here. I can't manage anything better than Fishie Mouth.

Last summer the hard drive on my old computer blew out. I took it to Best Buy and had one of their Geek Squad people look at it. After I decided to buy a new computer I asked about having a data retrieval disc made from the damaged hard drive. The computer tech at Best Buy told me he could get back the first e-mail I ever wrote on the old computer if I wanted. I'm pretty sure if this kid who works for an electronics store has the expertise to do this kind of thing then somebody at the NSA or CIA can manage to recover deleted e-mail from the RNCs' servers and backups.

mjfgates wrote:

I was just trolling on Redstate.com... the stupid, it burns!... anyway, in the midst of a thread on how awful it is that people are demanding the e-mails of White House staffers!, a commenter links back to this blog post, and is immediately called to task for linking to a "hate site."

Somebody more verbally agile than I am, please make whatever joke is appropriate here. I can't manage anything better than Fishie Mouth.

I admit I don't "get" the impulse to troll any site, be it Glenn's fine blog or the garbage-spewing Redstate.com. (I see trolling as the online equivalent of vandalism.) But I think the fact that they would label Glenn's as a "hate site" demonstrates that they are the authoritarian double-highs -- dead-enders in the 25% who will support Bush regardless.

They think they are "normal," and thus attribute their own motivations to others. Therefore, anyone who disagrees with them (regardless of the merits of any given argument) must be driven by "hate," just as they are.