Those "missing" White House emails are a source of meticulous but ambivalent caution for The Politico's blog, "The Crypt." Its front-page headline was, "RNC lost thousands of White House e-mails"; its inside headline was, "Deleted?"
The story itself contained this lead: "Flying in the face of the Presidential Records Act, the Republican National Committee lost or destroyed thousands of e-mails from current and former White House officials, according to a congressional report released Monday" [emphases added, obviously].
Yes, this is indeed a puzzler.
Could there possibly, just possibly, have been some skulduggery afoot? Well, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform "found that among the White House users were top political strategist Karl Rove ... and former political director Ken Mehlman, who formerly was chairman of the RNC."
Best be careful. Toss "lost" into the speculative reporting as often as "deleted" and "destroyed." After all, when discussing monuments to political chastity like Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, one can't be too fair and balanced.
Besides, "the committee [also] found that [it was] Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel, [who] failed to take any action to preserve the e-mails despite testimony that he knew about their widespread use."
You've gotta love it. "Failed to take any action to preserve" -- as in Al Capone "failed to take any action to preserve" his accountings of gambling, whorehouses, graft and bootlegging just before going on trial for income tax evasion.
And the puzzle kept growing: "Many revelations in the report itself stem from an earlier investigation into the contact between administration officials and incarcerated former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff."
Damn, more infernally incomprehensible dots to connect. But once again, could it possibly be, just possibly, that something felonious was taking place between White House officials and a soon-to-be convicted felon?
What's my point? I'm not sure myself, except for this: The Politico's "Crypt" needs to decide, as does every blog, if it's a blog or a straight-news column.
As we all know and have come to expect, blogs are for frolicking through the news with extreme prejudice and prodigious bias, two bents that often produce the extremely and prodigiously correct. In short, blogs are a way of bellowing what the news will merely whisper months from now.
So let the news pussyfoot; let the blogs rip.