Blogging on Meds

As early as last week, Barack Obama’s passport records - maybe his entire life’s worth of private information - were accessed by three State Department contract employees on three separate incidents… just for the hell of it… just a case of “imprudent curiosity”, the State Department spokesperson, Sean McCormack, is telling the media. Two people were fired and one was “disciplined” immediately after each incident when a monitoring system was tripped notifying supervisors that a high-profile person’s records were accessed. But the state department is still claiming that “senior management” only learned about the incidents “this afternoon” when they promptly reported it to Condoleezza Rice.

Like many before it, this ‘gate has all the ingredients of any Bush administration scandal-of-the-day. Sure, it’s another broken goverment agency managed by the blind, deaf and dumb for whom the word “investigate” is not in their vocabulary until they are caught in a cover-up. So we can’t trust what they are telling us as usual. We don’t know who these passport file peepers are, why they did it, who put them up to it or why the hell it wasn’t investigated. We have three potentially criminal acts by “low level” employees and their negligent and/or corrupt managers who would probably be protected by the crooked Department of Justice if the motivation was found to be political… unless of course it’s a purely Democratic scandal. Then we may actually find out exactly what went down. The Bush administration loves to fry Dems in their own oil.

MSNBC was all over it tonight on a special edition of Countdown with Keith Olberman. David Shuster could be on the A-list at the network for revealing an interesting connection if anything becomes of it. As The Huffington Post re-reported, Maura Harty, a former ambassador under Bill Clinton who may have some connection to the Hillary Clinton campaign was the Assistant Secretary of State For Consular Affairs during the first two breaches. Maura Harty (who was responsible for a backlog of 2 million passports last year) retired after the second incident, then it happened again. DailyKos is putting the pieces together. Other news outlets seem cautious about reporting this detail right now.

the lady in red - Maura.

The time line is sketchy! It happened on January 9th, February 21st and then March 14th.
In other words: right after Obama’s win in Iowa, right before the turban photo came out and last week - a rough week of attacks on Obama.

So who would gain from something like this?

Maybe Obama. This could start a rally for Obama if he handles it as well as he usually does. If this scandal gets blamed on the Clintons and it sticks, wouldn’t the nomination be settled quickly in Obama’s favor as the Clintons become more radioactive to the rest of the Democratic Party?

I’m guessing that the right-wingers will try spin this to their general advantage, cursing both Obama and Clinton, while continuing to divert any attention from McCain’s idiocy. I think they’ll contend that the Clinton’s have always been corrupt and will stop at nothing to control the white house. I think they’ll also start to speculate and raise questions about what might or might not be in perceived as incriminating in the records that were breached. They may try to force a controversy for a couple months to weaken Obama for more attacks against him later