Once again, our government fails to live up to the standards we are required to live up to...

Are you serious? No one else in this country could get away with this!

WASHINGTON IN BRIEF

The Washington Post
Saturday, March 22, 2008; Page A02

White House Says It Destroyed Hard Drives

Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House told a federal court yesterday, and some, but not necessarily all, of the data on those hard drives was moved to new ones.

The White House revealed the information about how it handles its computers in an effort to convince a federal magistrate that it would be fruitless to undertake a plan proposed by the court to recover millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

It would be costly and time-consuming for the White House to institute an e-mail retrieval program that entails pulling data off each individual workstation, the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola.

Now, for anyone who does not realize what this article is saying, basically the Bush White House has once again thumbed its collective nose at us for demanding to know just what the hell is going on up there. If a private company did something like this, there would be fines, jailtime, and attention-whoring congressional inquiries. Since the government was the perpetrator, it is instead "oops, my bad".

Why in the hell do we keep giving our government a free pass? We pass laws to require more truthful accounting, and yet the government has some of the shadiest accounting practices around. We hear people going off on "irresponsible" consumers, yet our government is running up debt like it is going out of style (and without much accountability, I might add). Our government has decided it is cool to invade our privacy at will, and yet has itself become less and less transparent.

Government should be held to a higher standard, not a considerably lower one.