I didn’t mention last night that Brit Hume did cover the Sandy Scissorhands story, both in an interview with Michael Isakoff, and as one of the segments with the “Fox All Stars” panel, so at least someone is tryng to keep it alive. Unusually, the panel was weighed liberal last night, with Bill Sammon vs Jeff Birnbaum and Mara Liasson. Mara said that Berger “…had a distinguished career.” Really?

What distinguished it more than this incident? I can’t think of a single thing that he accomplished. I suspect that she means that he had a long career, and served in the Clinton administration. Unfortunately, there are so many people who meet these criteria that the linguistic currency of the word becomes extremely devalued, even if one ignores that many Clinton appointees and employees distinguished themselves mostly with scandal and prevarication (something that Berger at least managed to avoid until recently).

Bill Sammon was incredulous (though you’d think he’d be used to it by now) at the limitless capacity of his co-panelists to extend the benefit of the doubt to his actions, and their unwillingness to consider the possibility of anything nefarious about it.

But at least Brit attempted to keep the topic alive.

The real problem, of course, is that the Justice Department seems to be brain dead (as, unaccountably, it almost always seems to be when it comes to investigating wrongdoing on the part of its predecessor administration). It’s going to be very difficult to get the media to follow up on this, when the message from the Justice Department itself seems to be “…move along folks, nothing to see here.” Even though the notion that he was just preparing for testimony by destroying documents is laughable, no one in the press is going to challenge it, because it’s just what they want to hear, at least when the beneficiary is a Clinton Dem.

If the blogosphere is to keep this alive and find out what really happened, perhaps that’s where the pressure should be placed–to get Gonzales’ people to be more forthcoming.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should add, in light of the comment below, that I was still confused even after the discussion. The story now seems to be that the Justice Department claims that only “copies” of the documents were taken, and that the originals were untouched. But what does this mean? Do they mean that no information was lost, including handwritten notes in the margins, or do they just mean that the five that Sandy Scissorhands purloined were all copies of a single document, of which the original still exists. If the latter, then as suggested in comments, and other places, what he was clearly destroying was the only copy of unique notes of individuals, and if he did, we now will never know the nature of what he destroyed, or his purpose in doing so, by definition, because he destroyed the evidence (which was obviously the intent, to anyone not in love with Democrats in general, and Clintonistas in particular).

Of course, evidence destruction, from Vince Foster on, was apparently a daily, almost recreational activity with these folks for eight years…

[Update at noon EDT]

The Washington Times thinks it knows the answer:

What was Mr. Berger doing with the documents? And why did he destroy only three? The likeliest answer is that he sought to conceal comments he or other Clinton administration officials wrote on them when they were circulating in January 2000. He couldn’t have been trying to erase the document itself from the record, since copies besides the five exist elsewhere. What’s likelier is that jottings in the margins of the three copies he destroyed bore telling indications of the Clinton administration’s approach to terrorism. Mr. Clarke’s document reportedly criticizes the Clinton administration’s handling of the millennial plots and mostly attributes the apprehension of a would-be bomber headed for Los Angeles International Airport to luck and an alert official.

If that turns out to be the case, Mr. Berger erased part of the historical record on terrorism. The Clinton administration’s cavalier attitude toward terrorism is by now well-established; it’s likely to be evident in the archival records and will crop up in official communications. An after-action report like Mr. Clarke’s, written nearly two years before the September 11 terrorist attacks, is as good a candidate as any for the telling aside in the margin.

Still waiting for an answer that makes more sense, and the “I destroyed the documents so that I could prepare for testimony” line doesn’t qualify. Of course, the biggest mystery remains why the Justice Department is playing dumb here, and they don’t have an answer for that one:

We can only speculate as to why the Department of Justice would agree to such lenient terms for the offense. Perhaps career employees or holdovers with ties to Democrats are responsible. Perhaps the Bush administration went soft. Whatever the reason, we can be reasonably sure it wasn’t done for reasons of national security, justice or truth.

Yup. I wonder what the New York Times thinks?

[crickets chirping]

The good news is that the Pope’s passing has knocked Terri Schiavo out of the news, when otherwise we could have continued to marinate in its aftermath for days. The bad news is that it also knocked everything else out, including Sandy Burglar. I had already predicted that no one would be talking about this tomorrow morning, because there’s no way to talk about it that reflects well on the media’s favorite (recent) administration–that of Bill Clinton. Now, it’s guaranteed–it will be all pontiff, all the time, maybe for a couple weeks until a successor is chosen.

I’m sure that many in the Washington press corps are breathing a sigh of relief to have an excuse to ignore the story. We can’t let them do it indefinitely–there are too many unanswered questions about which they’ve displayed too little curiousity.

What is the credulity level of a reporter who can write a story like this with no allusion to how little sense it makes?

First, the lead:

The Justice Department said yesterday there was no evidence that former national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger was trying to conceal information when he illegally took copies of classified terrorism documents out of the National Archives in 2003…

…Department lawyers concluded that Berger took the documents for personal convenience — to prepare testimony — and not with the intent of destroying evidence or thwarting the Sept. 11 panel’s inquiry as to whether the Clinton administration did enough to confront a rising terrorist threat.

Then, she writes:

In acknowledging the crime to Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson, Berger said he knowingly took five copies of different versions of the same classified document — briefings for the Clinton administration on terrorism threats — from the National Archives in the fall of 2003. As part of his plea, Berger also acknowledged that he destroyed three of the copies, and returned the remaining two to archives officials and said he had “misfiled” them.

How does destroying documents help one “prepare testimony”? The story makes it sound like they were accidentally destroyed, but she can’t be bothered to mention that he deliberately shredded them with scissors. There is still no explanation for this, from either her, or at least as she reports, from the Justice Department people.

And what are we to make of this?

Hillman noted that Berger only had copies of the documents — not the originals — and so was not charged with the more serious crime of destroying documents.

But if they were only “copies” (indicating that the information on them was identical) why did he need five of them? And what was the purpose of destroying three of them? Is Hillman an idiot? Why did he get such a light sentence when there are so many seemingly unanswered questions?

And I loved this bit:

Friends of Berger said he hopes the embarrassing episode does not badly tarnish his reputation.

As long as Berger, like all corrupt former Clinton officials, has friends in the press, his reputation will apparently be just fine. And does anyone think that this reporting would have been the same if it were a Bush administration official accused of the same thing? No, I suspect there’s be much more curiousity on the part of this reporter, and others.

[Update on Monday morning]

For those visitors this morning from Instapundit, note that this is a follow up of an earlier post on this subject.

Despite the wall-to-wall coverage of the passing of the pontiff, we can’t let this story fall off the radar, no matter how badly the press wishes that it would go away.

I got a call from a salesman at Google the other week, trying to get me to run Google ads at my site. Well, until this gets fixed, don’t count on it.

I didn’t watch Dan’s last broadcast (following my pattern for the past twenty-plus years).

I thought that low ratings would be the fittest ending to his ignoble career.

National Review Online is piling on the departing Dan Ra^ther, here, here, here, here, and here. It’s no more than he deserves. Probably a little less, in fact.

For those who can’t get enough, here and here are a couple of my own past satirical posts on the subject.

That’s what Ralph Kinney Bennett says. For the good ones, at least:

It’s precisely because good journalism is hard that I love bloggers.

They are always ready to pounce. Whether you’re CBS News or the Daily Bugle, they will not let you get by on the cheap. They teach you by their native wisdom. They teach you by their ignorance.

They can be immensely unfair and incredibly stupid. They open up new vistas for you and force you to consider sometimes cockeyed perspectives that end up giving you more perspective.

They bring the world to a screen right in front of your eyes — in all its uncouth, elegant, raw, funny, revolting, thoughtful, partisan, passionate, tedious, upsetting, amazing, predictable, biased, sordid, elemental, ethereal, exhaustive, cynical, hopeful, delightful, excruciating variety.

And they are providing a venue for some thoughtful, fresh, clever writers who otherwise might have taken a while to find their way into print.

Pompous journalists are disdainful of blogs because they feel threatened by them. They are like members of the Raccoon Lodge and the bloggers just barreled into the ritual room and tore open the curtains and they all look slightly ridiculous in their epaulets and tin pot hats and braided swallowtail coats.

Also, this:

The unmasking of “the li’l Injun that could” set me to thinking. Can you imagine what a job freewheeling bloggers would have done on Adolf Hitler as he was on his “way up?”

Or (not that I’m making any comparisons here) Bill Clinton?

Hiawatha Bray has gotten into trouble with his bosses at the Boston Globe for expressing his political opinions on line:

…Bray posted an item under his own name on a blog hosted by the San Jose Mercury News dismissing Kerry’s strategy of promoting his Vietnam service record as “moronic.”

Bray promoted many of the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry – some of which were proven false. He questioned his own paper’s work, dismissing probes of Bush’s National Guard service as “innuendo.”

And in another Web forum after the election, Bray identified himself as a “Bush supporter” and said he’s “feeling pretty good now.”

Emphasis mine. I’m not aware of any that were “proven false.” That’s the same kind of sophistry–well, lie, actually–that the same folks use when they say that the Independent Council report “proved the Clintons innocent” of everything in Whitewater. As far as I’m aware, the worst that can be said about any of the charges is that they remain in dispute. Few of them can be resolved absent Kerry’s service records, which he continues to refuse to release, despite his statement that he would do so to Tim Russert a few weeks ago.

Anyway, that’s a side issue. According to the article, Bray “had been told in November his postings were ‘inappropriate and in violation of our standards.”’

One can’t help but wonder if they would have been more”appropriate” and in keeping with their “standards” if the criticism had instead been directed at George Bush, rather than the hometown boy.

Weapons of Mass Distraction, that is. Remember all the stories, led by the New York Times, the week before the election about Al Qaqaa, and the missing munitions, and (of course!) the incompetence of the Bush administration in not guarding them properly? Remember how we haven’t heard anything about it since?

Byron York does:

The obvious question is whether the Times pushed the Al Qaqaa story hard in the days in which it might have an effect on the presidential election, and then let up the moment the election was over. Okrent conceded that that might appear to be the case. “I would say at the very least that the dates they were running stories certainly can leave an impression,” Okrent told NRO. “But I’m not ready to convict, at least not yet.”

No. But then, he never is.

Why journalists need a broader education, Part 34,567,276:

The European-built Huygens descended through the dense atmosphere and touched down on the largest and most intriguing moon of Saturn on Friday.

On board is a $12 million spectrogram built by scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder that will analyze electroviolet light.

Emphasis mine.

My email correspondent who sent me this informs me that it was a republication of an article by the noted NYT science reporter John Noble Wilford.

Based on a discussion with my friend who is a scientist on the descent imager, Wilford wrote his piece without the idiocy, which was added by a reporter at the Denver Post, who was no doubt trying to provide a