Government Executive has an interesting tech report (via ThinkProgress):

Eighteen agencies have been asked by the Office of Special Counsel to preserve electronic information dating back to January 2001 as part of its governmentwide investigation into alleged violations of the law that limits political activity in federal agencies.

The OSC task force investigating the claims has asked agencies, including the General Services Administration, to preserve all e-mail records, calendar information, phone logs and hard drives going back to the beginning of the Bush administration. The task force is headed by deputy OSC special counsel James Byrne.

No matter how the GOP tries to spin it, the difference between how the Bush Administration as treated the administrative agencies and prior administrations is substantial.  As a prior article in National Journal (via Government Executive) outlined, both Democratic and Republican officials from past administrations are appalled at the crassness of the Bush WH political machinations:

The ultimate focus of the various investigations is the White House Office of Political Affairs, under the supervision of Karl Rove, Bush’s deputy chief of staff and senior political adviser. Goodling didn’t recall talking directly to Rove, but she described having regular conversations with his aides about finding attorneys who would be “ideologically compatible” with the president.It isn’t just Democrats who say that the linkage between White House staffers, government functions, and the interests of the Republican Party has become too tight.

“I’m appalled,” Republican political consultant Ed Rollins says of the heavy-handed partisan politics that have been revealed in this year’s congressional oversight hearings. Rollins was political affairs director in the Reagan administration — the first one to have such a government-funded office.

In Rollins’s day, firewalls kept the political operatives from having direct contact with executive departments — particularly Justice.

“What’s happened with this administration is that too many people came in, like the Karl Roves, who had no experience in government,” Rollins says. “Campaigns are very separate things, where you’re always trying to think politically.”

Political aides working in administrative agencies is nothing new — from FDR forward, it has been a traditional hand-in-hand approach for Presidential administrations to put political hands in place to carry out the particular priorities that the President and his political minds see as most important. But there are lines that have traditionally not been crossed, both by tradition and by legal requirement — and the Bush Administration has disregarded those lines for far too long without being called on it.Until now.

The Bush White House has made the consolidation of political power its mission, and has shoved the hard work of actually governing to the side far too often for the nation’s good. 

Those Rove interviews, which wandered over an expanse of policy questions, were memorable, said Doug Sosnik, who was Clinton’s political affairs director in the White House and later his senior adviser, because Rove “was transparent and open about the politics driving the policy.” Based on his own experience, Sosnik remembers thinking that such openness was “a big mistake.”

“For anyone to say there isn’t politics in the White House is ridiculous,” Sosnik continued, conceding that the Clinton White House justly earned a reputation for being overtly political while governing. Clinton’s campaign finance activities, which sparked federal and congressional investigations, were an example of “pushing all the way to the line without crossing it,” he said.

The evolution from the Clinton political operation to the Bush shop holds distinctions with real differences, Clinton’s former aides argue.

“The problem with this White House is that they conflated the policy and political roles that Rove had so that they are indistinguishable,” Sosnik said. “They took the letter of the law and pushed it to at least the line, if not over it, and in the process certainly violated the spirit of it. They got used to it; that was the culture. And they had a supplicant Congress that was their witness protection program. It was a culture where everyone understood the reward system.”

That culture — and Bush’s ambition to consolidate executive power — has helped erode Bush’s credibility and his powers to persuade, suggested Leon Panetta, who was Clinton’s second chief of staff, his former budget director, and for 17 years before that a Democratic member of Congress from California. “Every president has that political instinct, but you cannot make everything you do the result of political motivation because you lose the ability to persuade the American people that substantively it is in their interest,” he said.

It is well past time that the whole nation stop the comfortably numb indifference to how governing is done, and stood up and demanded that it be done well — for all of our sakes. Because, at the moment, we are living in a nation where good governance is considered a luxury.

Karl Rove was set free to pull whatever political strings he wanted for the last 6 years and then some — because George Bush and his CEO governance farmed out the tough work, and Rove is too enamored with his own “cleverness” on political trickery to admit — to himself or others — that he had a lot to learn about in terms of doing the real, difficult, day-to-day work that is required once you win the election.  Chasing wins can give you a rush, I suppose, but that isn’t the role of the President once he has taken office.  That they have continued to work their priorities toward chasing more wins, rather than making decisions for the good of the whole nation, is quite telling — they have put themselves well ahead of the nation, time and time again. 

Politics should not be solely about the win.  What you do once you have won is everything and, by that measure, the Bush Administration is a failure, plain and simple.  The hard work is governing, and George Bush and his political minions have never, ever been about the doing of the work.  And it shows.

And had the Democrats not taken control of Congress in 2006, we wouldn’t know even a tiny fraction of what we do at the moment because the GOP-controlled Congress failed to do any meaningful oversight for the first 6 years of the Bush Administration as the WH political office, headed by Rove, pulled the strings of the GOP puppet Congress using campaign funds as a big stick.  Think about all of the little tidbits that Sen. Pat Leahy and his Senate Judiciary Committee alone have been able to glean in the last few months.  And then multiply that out by all of the committees in both houses of Congress doing meaningful, desperately needed oversight.  Thank goodness for sunshine.

It ought to be an expectation that governance is the priority — for the nation as a whole, not just for cronies, big political donors, political machinations and Presidential pals. Isn’t it time we started demanding better, for all of us?

(Was in the mood for some Pink Floyd this morning.  Enjoy this clip of Comfortably Numb.  Seemed to fit the national mood for some reason.)