Sadly, recent events forced me to take out the peg on my shcadenfreud-ometer. Is it 26 or 76? Who knows.
* World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz personally dictated the rule-breaking pay deal that the WB set up for his girlfriend. Heck, this scandal even has sex in it.
* Drum wraps up the bothched ratf*ck aspect of the Army tour extensions as well as anybody.
* Will Rove’s bad email habits put him back in Patrick Fitzgerald’s spotlight?
* The email scandals in general highlight the way that every scandal seems to only lead to newer, more egregiously heinous misbehavior. Why aren’t people talking about the firing of David Iglesias anymore? Because Gonzales and most of his aides lied their asses off and got caught by their own documents. Why aren’t people talking about Gonzales’s serial mendacity? Because the document dump left out staggering numbers of inappropriatelly filed emails. That would be a top story, except that the White House lost five million of its own internal emails over a two year period. Five million.
As grateful as all this makes me for Congress’s new subpoena power, it seems like almost too much. Does anybody seriously think that the next pullled thread won’t uncover something even more heinous? Of course it will. There’s only so much space on page one, which means that scandals that would have crippled any normal administration will be lucky to get a blurb on A16. Exponential increases cannot last forever, but my general epiphenomenal sense tells me that we have plenty of log phase growth to go before peak schadenfreude.