In four weeks, every single email and document the Bush administration created is required by law to be sent to the National Archives. They are scrambling to make sure that doesn't happen, obv.

All presidential records go to the archives, and in four years journalists can look at some of them, after a six year wait for the archivists to find the relevant documents, of course, because the National Archives are severely understaffed because no one in government likes them or their stupid mission of stupid "transparency" and "history."

But the White House is sort of vaguely cooperating, shipping truckloads of material to Dallas for eventual storage at Bush's comical presidential library, which will consist of the usual scale model of the oval office, a bullhorn, and animatronic ghosts of dead New Orleanians, Iraqis, and that retarded person Bush killed in Texas.

Oh, but Cheney! Dick Cheney, that best Vice President of all, he is not going to forward a single goddamn email to anyone. He is going to find a way to burn these "electronic mails." He will back up all the requested material to tapes and disks and then he will take these tapes and disks out back and shoot them, with guns.

The law is pretty clear: all documents related to the VP's official duties are to be preserved and transfered to the archives. Cheney, of course, has a hilariously skewed interpretation of that law. Cheney says he "alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records" and "how his records will be created, maintained, managed, and disposed." The nice thing about Dick Cheney is that he will just straight-up tell you when he intends to ignore or violate a law, and that is the only thing he will tell you about anything he does, because his records are all in his "man-sized" safe in his office, and that safe will be in his deep-sea underwater bunker, with Cheney, once the full extent of his crimes against humanity become clear, on January 21, 2009.

Also did you know that creating a machine to "read" these "electronic mails" apparently requires huge sums of money being sent to defense contractors?

At the Navy base, all the electronic data are supposed to be "ingested" by a new electronic system meant to allow such efficient cataloguing, indexing and searching that millions of documents can eventually be provided to researchers and citizens online.

The system, which has been under development for a decade by Lockheed Martin and other contractors at a cost of $67.5 million, will rely on software created after the collapse of Enron, when that company's creditors demanded new tools for quickly sorting its e-mail trove to find damaging information.

Huh. They could've had, like, Google do this, for free, right? No, Lockheed Martin had a great solution to this "ingesting electronic mail" problems, of course.

Anyways in maybe 2050 or so someone will write a really good book using some never-before-seen documents from these terrible times and we'll all say "never again" as President Miss Beazley preemptively invades the equator, because it is the last place on Earth safe from our new ICE AGE. (Didn't see that one coming, stupid Al Gore, did you.)