Right regurgitates the Sandy Berger canard. . .

Every year about this time, Wingnuttia gets crazy and gets the five minute hate in on old Sandy Berger. Today, after the spectacularly bush-fluffing Bill Sammon declared that the Berger was an “advisor” to the Hillary Clinton campaign — a contention denied by the senator — Sean Hacckity declared that what Berger did was “worse than Watergate.”

I’ve gone over all this before, but here’s the gist of the matter:

* We know already that the 9/11 Commission had every single document Berger mishandled. How do we know this? Because 9/11 Commission member Slade Gorton, a lifelong republican, said so: “We have every one of those documents.”

* We know that no documents were lost as a result of Berger’s perfidy. How do we know that? We know that because Noel Hillman, the chief prosecutor in the Berger case said: ?Nothing was lost to the public or the process.? And how does Hillman know this? He knows this because the documents Berger took and destroyed “were printed out from a hard drive at the Archives and have no notations at all.”

All the Wingnut blathering about Berger being some kind of Moriarty covering up for the Clintons is equal parts stupidity, ignorance, and malice.

Berger’s actions were wrong and he’s an embarassment, but his actions are essentially trivial in historical context. Only a flaming asshole like Sean Hannity could compare them to Watergate, let alone claim Berger’s petty criminal acts eclipsed that scandal.