Here at the Renaissance, we’ve long known that a tendency to get interested in a lot of things can be an obstacle to building an audience. No one can figure out what you may want to talk about next. So it is always gratifying when a few of our favorite themes get together on a single subject. Such was the case this past week when politics, computing and blogging came together on the White House’s handling of the current Justice Department scandal.

As Orwell examined in “1984″, Control of Information is a critical tool in the acquisition of power. That tool assumes many forms, among them managing information (talking point memos, sycophantic reporters and media outlets), partial information, misinformation (lies), and this past week, Information Overload, as the White House had the Justice Department handed over more than 3,000 pages of email purported to cover the Department’s activity with respect to the Fired US Attorneys issue.

It was a planned media moment for the Administration: “See how open and honest we are”, but the thinking behind it seemed to be the same I used when writing papers in college … make the paper BIG enough and the professor may find it easier to assume it is complete and will provide a reasonable grade without actually reading it.

But although the current White House organization has proven it is adept at managing the mainstream media, the blogging community has got their number. Besides maintaining intense focus on the issue (unlike, for example, CNN, whose producers can no longer distinguish a Constitutional threat from Britney Spears’s rehab in its Top Headlines), bloggers are bringing new information management thinking to these situations.

For example: 3,000 pages of emails? No big deal … this is a situation just made for distributed processing. Get 30 active participants on the blog, have each take 100 pages and get busy combing through. Share discoveries, ideas, theories via the comment board or IM and bang … within a few hours facts are brought to light that would otherwise take days and weeks and may, for that reason, not get talked about at all because Britney needs another round of rehab and the mass attention has wandered off. Interesting facts and theories develop quickly, like:

- Hey, anyone notice that there’s an 18 DAY gap in the calendar of emails? Holy Rosemary Woods, Batman!

- Question: Is this all of it? Does Karl Rove have any other email accounts, say through the RNC? (”Oh, yeah“, sez Tony Snow). OK, where is the traffic from that?

- And guys, it’s not that we don’t trust you, but … OK, we DON’T trust you. Can we get the email server logs for these days? We don’t propose to read through all the Department’s stuff, but what percent of the total email traffic do these 3,000 pages represent? Are there any deviations from the trend in the daily average? Is there anyone on the cc: line whose responses we may be systematically ignoring? Not that we don’t trust you, but …

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” -Aeschylus

… even if it is an Oil-man’s war dressed up in “Terrorist Boogiemen Under Your Bed” clothing, I guess.

The singular truth that seems to emerge from Plame-gate and now this bizarre Alberto Gonzales situation (in which, for whatever reason, the current Administration is lying about something they were allowed to do, however crummy their idiotic motives) is that this is, in fact, and Administration of Lies. It is What They Do. They’ve had Six Soft Years of nobody asking them the hard questions so that now, under just mild pressure, it appears that they lie, all the time, possibly for simple expedience (with an underlying contempt for the intelligence of anyone not actually in the room with them, apparently). The alternative is almost too terrible to imagine … that they actually believe the crap they are spewing. Like Milo Minderbinder in Heller’s Catch-22, utterly able to fabricate a reality for themselves out of anything that rationalizes their base urges.

Two excellent posts summarizing this. First in the in the Daily Kos: “But we will never know for certain because we’ve got gangsters running the executive branch instead of men and women committed to the rule of law. Rendition, torture, secret prisons, rancid legal reasoning, attempts to transform the Constitution and Geneva Conventions into so much confetti, and lies, lies, lies have characterized every aspect of the treatment our so-called leaders have meted out to those they say were responsible for Nine Eleven and other terrorist acts.”

Second, this deconstruction of the Press Secretary’s claim that “There is a process that the administration has in place to address the leak of classified information.” (The process seeming to consist of lying to state that there is a process … “Move along folks, nothing to see here …”)

Because I’ve enjoyed the Mighty Girl blog, and because it was recommended by Matt Baldwin, who writes Defective Yeti, another favorite blog, and because I liked the title, I bought Margaret Mason’s book “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch/100 Ideas for Your Blog“. A very rapid waste of $20.

The book is the length of an extended blog post, and has, in fact, two ideas and a lot of filler. Save your money.