This whole hullabaloo over someone at State snooping around in Barack Obama's passport file stinks like week-old fish. Now, suddenly, we've got State saying that they've been elbow deep beyond the borderline in Hillary Clinton and John McCain's files... so, don't worry, right? Because it wasn't politically motivated, our naughty naughty employees are snooping on everyone!

Bullshit, Pyle!

This goes back to the total disregard for the law and the Constitution that was the original wiretapping story. "Warrants that we can get after the fact that have a 99.9998% approval rate slow us down, so we need to completely ignore the court that was designed just for this purpose. After all, TURRISTS!" Why wouldn't they just get a warrant? Two possible reasons (neither of which were the stated one): 1) The 99.9998% approving FISA court would have said NO NO NO to the warrants they wanted to get. 2) They knew the FISA court would never approve a warrant form with the "Who do you want to spy on" field filled out with "Everybody."

I think scenario 2 rings a bell here. One guy peeking? Yeah, but that one guy is DICK CHENEY.

Kagro X at Daily Kos sums it up pretty well:

What an amazing development, eh? George H.W. Bush's State Department sticks their nose into Bill Clinton's passport file, but the "responsible" official resigns, and nothing ever comes of it. Lesson learned? Sure! Now George W. Bush's State Department is free to stick its nose into Hillary Clinton's files. Plus anyone else it feels like poking around on. And like almost everything that happens around Condoleezza Rice, no one could have foreseen it!

Dangerous domestic spying? Or just imprudent use of a new class of massive, all-encompassing, Total Information Awareness-style databases by unnamed and unidentifiable "outside contractors" and "low-level employees?" Who knows?

And does it really make a difference? So long as a government official in a proper-looking suit tells reporters -- from behind a proper-looking podium with a proper-looking seal on it and proper-looking blue draperies behind -- that it's "been taken care of," though they can't tell you the names of the employees (confidentiality, you know) or the name of the contractor (national security, you know), then everything's just find and dandy, right?

Besides, it's just another opportunity for Republicans to point out how "Big Government" doesn't work. Just look! We can't make it work, either! And if that contractor was a government employee, Teh UnionZ would make it impossible for us to fire him. So really, this breach was a terrific way for us to demonstrate that outsourcing really works! Sure, we had to let someone totally unvetted and totally untrustworthy access sensitive personal information about our opposition's top political leaders to prove it, but prove it we did! After all, we just announced that this unverifiable person was unverifiably fired. What more proof of our dedication to security and freedom could you want?

Yeah. That sounds about right.

-pb