Is this the re-birth of EmailGate?

Now… I’m not one of those conspiracy-minded theorists… but every once in a while there is something in the news that makes me want to start working on my tinfoil hat… this article in today's WaPo is one of those instances that just screams; conspiracy…

Or gross incompetence…

A White House study found that there is 473 days worth of emails that are gone… vanished… nowhere to be found…

Now I would have to think that the Presidential Records Act should not be news to the IT staff working at the White House, especially since it’s been in place since 1978, meaning they’ve had 23 years before the Bush(whacked) Administration got involved to get this right. Which means, in my eyes, that there’s no excuse for this to have happened legitimately… which leads one to believe that there is something illegitimate to it… as in, perhaps, something to hide?

Apparently Rep. Henry Waxman agrees with me, as has announced that he is scheduling a hearing on February 15th in light of the news that no e-mail in the White House was archived on 473 days for various units of the Executive Office of the President and that there are also 16 days of no archived e-mails for the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, dating from Sept. 12, 2003, to May 23, 2005…

What’s with the secrecy, anyway? Doesn’t the Executive Branch (and all of the government for that matter) exist to perform the people's business? Okay, I know now I’m being naïve… but that IS what they’re supposed to be for…

I realize that there would be issues that are secret due to national security reasons, but a more thorough look at some of the agencies that “lost” emails makes one wonder… the Council on Environmental Quality, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative… not exactly agengies that are at the forefront of the so-called War on Terror.

So what gives? Is this incompetence? Or fraud? Or stupidity? The stonewalling we are getting from the administration tends to make me believe it's the latter…

Again, Mr. Waxman seemingly agrees with me, especially after White House tool spokesman tool Tony Fratto had this exchange yesterday; “I think our review of this… I think to the best of what all the analysis we've been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing...we have no reason to believe that any email at all are missing.”
Reporter: “So where are they?”
Fratto: “Where are what?”

Nice… who’s on first Fratto??? Putz.

And, if I may make a wild suggestion here Mr. Waxman, rather than have months and months of sternly worded letters going back and forth, how about you cut to the chase, issue subpoenas now and, I don’t know, call me silly; enforce them…

Or would that make too much sense for Washington DC???