Poetic Justice for the Bush White House

"The Moving Finger writes," said Omar Khayyam, "and, having writ, moves on..." But not according to US District Judge Henry Kennedy, who yesterday instructed White House officials to "collect and preserve all e-mails sent or received between March 2003 and October 2005."

He was responding to a suit by Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Government to keep the current occupants from disposing of more than 300 million e-mail messages and 25,000 boxes of documents.

National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton points out: "In six days the Bush Executive Office of the President will be gone and without this order, their records may disappear with them. The White House will complain about the last-minute challenge, but this is a records crisis of the White House's own making."

If and when Congress appoints a special prosecutor to look into alleged criminal behavior in starting the Iraq war, outing Valerie Plame and firing the US Attorneys, among a multitude of possible crimes, the electronic and paper trail from Karl Rove et al will be critical evidence.

In that event, the Bush alumni will have to ponder the rest of Omar Khayyam's poetic wisdom: "nor all thy Piety nor Wit/Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line/Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

It will not be the first instance of ancient voices from the Middle East coming back to haunt them.

Show-and-Tell for Cheney

The Vice President has never been a gushy kind of guy, but his innate modesty and shyness will have to give way to a court order today to preserve his records so the rest of us may eventually get some idea of how he was running the country in total privacy for the past eight years.

Responding to the suit of the watchdog group CREW, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the VP's records are not excluded under the Presidential Records Act, which gives the national archivist custody of the material when Bush and Cheney leave office.

Their lawyers had sought a narrow interpretation to allow the VP to withhold as much as possible from National Archives, but the judge said no.

"Defendants were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation of the PRA's statutory language," Kollar-Kotelly said in her order. This position "heightens the Court's concern" that some records would not be preserved without an injunction.

As we learned in the Valerie Plame case, pinning down what Cheney said and did is not easy, but today's judgment will go some distance toward helping historians breach Cheney's cone of silence as he helped lie us into a disastrous war, violated the civil rights of anyone who disagreed with him and pulled the strings of a puppet president.

A while back, when he deigned to give an interview, Cheney was asked about public disapproval of the Iraq war. His answer, with a shrug, was "So?"

Today's court decision is the first step toward getting more definitive answers than that.