Two low level clerks under contract to the State Department have been let go for snooping in Barack Obama’s passport files on at least 3 separate occasions. Another State Department employee has been disciplined as a result of the incidents.
This is what is known at the moment. But does that stop our intrepid internet paranoids, goofballs, nitwits, and other denizens of the left from creating a grand conspiracy involving evil Bush and his evil minions out of the thinnest of news items?
The ever rational and reasonable Americablog:
This is not good. We know how much we can trust anyone who works for George Bush. NOT AT ALL.The first Bush administration did the same thing to Bill Clinton.
Please note the absolute, rock solid, dead certainty that the 2nd Bush Administration is guilty. Based on nothing except the paranoid delusions of the author.
The towering intellects at Firedoglake:
They are not saying yet who these people are,which Halliburton subsidiary is involvedwho the contractor is, and therefore we have no idea which Party they belong to—“The War Mongering Republicans” or the “Rapture Republicans”. However, for each of these two groups the last seven years “imprudent curiosity” usually manifests itself at airport bathrooms or donkey shows. So we really have no idea how this will play out.
This one gets an “A” for mentioning Haliburton and donkey shows in the same post.
Shakesville also gets high marks for including a Yakov Smirnoff joke:
Evidently some low-levelpatsiesstaffers were fired for their role in looking for that one time Obama flew to Afghanistan to meet with his al Qaeda overlords. One can only assume they’ve also looked carefully to find all the times Hillary Clinton flew to Novosibirsk in her youth. And if those visits didn’t exist before, they probably do now.As Yakov Smirnoff might say: “In Soviet Russia, government reads secret passport files on political opponents. But in America, same thing! What a country!”
Sorry if I whetted your appetite for a “joke.” Unless you’re a liberal, such incandescent humor seems to elude the rational among us.
And don’t forget the “patsies!” (Why does the left use so man strike-throughs?) All that’s missing is the grassy knoll and Woody Harrleson’s dad.
In truth, gentle readers, there is a much more mundane explanation than George Bush is lifting a finger to help John McCain; Hillary did it:
I remember hearing their charge that Obama had only visited one NATO country in his life and it seemed pretty hard to believe… out of countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Turkey, etc., Obama had only been to one? The boy who grew up in Indonesia, and visited relatives in Africa, never made it to any of those European countries? The guy who lived in Chicago and went to Harvard never made it to Canada? (I presume Canada wasn’t the site of the brief stopover trip.)Now, I’m not saying that the Hillary camp did the snooping in the passport file. But in asking that question, they seemed awfully certain that Obama had never been to one of those countries earlier in his life, didn’t they? Note they didn’t say, “you have traveled to only one NATO country as a senator”, (it wouldn’t be all that surprising that Obama had only taken a few foreign trips since taking office in January 2005); they worded the question so that it encompasses his entire life.
The question came from the Hillary camp on March 12; two of the breaches were before that date. One breach occurred two days later.
Maybe Hillary and Bush are working together. Maybe Bush is using Hillary as a cut out to carry out his nefarious plans. Maybe Hillary wears army boots.
Or maybe there’s nothing there. From Hillary booster and spouse of world famous super spy Valerie Plame:
Folks, this is really a non-story. ... .. We know he has not visited Europe. His only real overseas travel before joining the Senate was to Africa. And the passport records do not contain info about that trip, other than the date he made the trip. People with no need to know should not have been checking out his documents, but at the end of the day there is no there there.
The above via Taylor Marsh who adds “No kidding.” Which actually is more to the point.
No one can be this stupid, can they? No one can be paranoid enough to take these two schmucks who were poking around in Obama’s private files and turn them into GOP operatives or even Hillary boosters for that matter, can they?
Whether out of curiosity or, more likely, hoping to find something they could sell to the press or perhaps Obama’s opponents, for a conspiracy to reach down in the bowels of the State Department and pluck these two non entities from total obscurity and charge them with carrying out a super secret operation (where they failed miserably because the computer caught the intrusions right away) is beyond belief, beyond reasonableness, and makes the purveyors of such claptrap beyond hope.
At the end of the day, we will find the State Department isn’t run very well. The fact that it has taken weeks for this to come to light is more a function of the crushing bureaucracy that paralyzes that department than any deliberate attempt to hide or cover up the truth.
By all means let’s have a thorough investigation of the clerks and especially their immediate supervisors who apparently didn’t think it important enough to inform management that Obama’s privacy had been shredded. The fact that a reporter was the person to break the news to the upper levels of the State Department points right back to those two clerks who were so inept at their spying they didn’t seem to know that they had been discovered the minute Obama’s file was breached.
Some conspirators.
Conspiracies are for the weak minded. They are a lazy substitute for reasoned, rational thought. Even a cursory examination of this matter reveals the chances that the Bush Administration or even the Hillary campaign being involved to be next to zero since the perpetrators were identified and caught so easily.
If I were the left, I’d stick with conspiracies involving aliens and Area 51. At least those plots are halfway entertaining.