Remembrance of times past

CNN has an item up reporting that Republican Darrell Issa has written a letter to the Obama White House demanding the preservation under the Presidential Records Act of personal emails sent by officials during a brief transition period from personal accounts before the activation of whitehouse.gov accounts. Issa demands answers to his questions by March 4.

The PRA is a good thing, and the Obama administration should obey it. In fact, they consciously and conscientiously have done so:

A White House spokesman told CNN Thursday that all staff were told to forward any official correspondence to their White House e-mail accounts, and added that private e-mail accounts are no longer being used.

“In order to ensure that they were accessible in the first hours and days of the administration, some staff members created email accounts from which to conduct official business before their government accounts were operational,” a spokesman for the White House said in an email to CNN.

“Those staff members were instructed to forward any presidential records that they established during that time period, including emails, to their government email accounts to ensure that they would be in compliance with the Presidential Records Act. Those temporary accounts are no longer being used.”

Let's see, has any recent administration failed utterly and often totally to obey this law? Is that possible?

Well, Martina Stewart and CNN irresponsibly aren't going to mention that the Bushist White House tolerated multiple end runs around the PRA. Here are three:

• Use of RNC accounts by Karl Rove and several others
• A complete "outage" of back-ups conveniently during the drumbeating for war in Iraq
• Darth Cheney's assertion that he was immune from the PRA

Where was Darrell Issa during the Bushist violations? He was defending them!

These Republicans wear the logs in their eyes like a badge of belonging. They think we all have early onset Alzheimer's.