Two more out the door

Coming from an administration that cares so little about personal privacy, this news shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who isn’t a lemming.

The first report by a civilian board created to oversee government protection of personal privacy has… well… has seen its privacy violated.

The Bush(whacked) administration had made more than 200 revisions to the first report by the civilian board, including deleting a passage on anti-terrorism programs that intelligence officials deemed "potentially problematic" intrusions on civil liberties, according to a draft of the report obtained by The Washington Post.

One of the panel's five members, Democrat Lanny Davis, resigned in protest Monday and cited those deletions by White House lawyers and aides as the primary reason.

Davis is, at best, a fleeting Democrat who has, in the past, been overly apologetic for gop transgressions and had become a gop ass-kisser & a BushCrony.

But in recent months Davis’ Democratic conscience has seemingly re-taken his brain as he’s had clashes with other board members and White House officials over what he saw as attempts by the administration to control the panel’s agenda and edit its public statements.

The very idea that a Bush(whacked) administration “Privacy and Civil Liberties Board” would function as any kind of an independent watchdog is as derisory as thinking that lobbying reform would ever happen. It’s as preposterous as thinking that the administration’s “Clean Skies Initiative” and “Healthy Forests Initiative” were anything more than kick-backs for the energy and timber industries respectively.

When Davis protested over the editing of the report, the board was told that White House lawyers feared, because U.S. attorneys used the material witness law, that a new probe of that issue would become a part of the larger AttorneyGate controversy.

So Davis resigned and he did it the same day that Assistant AG McNulty did.

We’ll ignore the fact for a moment that he thought that this administration would ever do anything NOT like that and concentrate on what this means to the administration… especially coming on the heels of McNulty’s resignation.

It means plenty.

For one thing his resignation shows the panel for what is really is and was, another White House mouthpiece; a concept strengthened back in March when they announced that Bush's warrantless surveillance program was no cause for concern.

And another thing, with Davis leaving the same day McNulty did, the White House is now faced with a daunting task of filling two positions at once while simultaneously protecting Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove and the President himself.

Something that seems to get harder and harder each day.

Stay tuned…