Learning from history

Somebody's trying to force the White House to cough up some e-mails:

A private watchdog group is asking the White House to show immediately that it has not destroyed archives of at least 5 million e-mails that were improperly deleted from internal servers. So far, the Bush administration has refused to provide such assurances.

A motion filed Friday by the National Security Archive seeks to compel the White House to hand over records that show it has maintained backup tapes of the deleted e-mails, as required by presidential record-keeping laws. A nearly identical case from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, another watchdog, seeks similar assurances that the Bush administration has not permanently erased the millions of e-mails exchanged among scores of White House aides.

Now, of course we know that this administration never learns anything from its own mistakes and rarely learns anything from history, but I'm willing to bet they learned one thing from Nixon's history. If you're going to erase the tapes, don't just erase them, burn them and disperse the ashes over the skyline drive. Believe me, these e-mails are never going to see the light of day. They're gone for good. And, the fact that it's illegal to destroy them will be forgotten.