Huck-a-bee Chuck-a-Byte

OK. By now it’s probably old news. But bad news often bears repeating: we can learn from it.

According to here, as Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee ordered the destruction of “hard drives in 83 computers and four servers” at a cost of $13,000, allegedly “to protect the privacy of data on the drives.”

Well, were the contents archived before the disks were destroyed? Why weren’t they just reformatted? What kind of oversight was there in this? How could there have been “sensitive information” on the drives that wasn’t appropriate for the next governor’s staff to see? What exactly were they storing?

I can't help but believe that there must have been some thing, some secret – probably many some-things and many secrets – to hide. There also must have been information that might have been embarrassing to someone – probably many someones - on those drives. Otherwise, why wouldn’t that "sensitive" information be useful to the next staff?

Would Mr. Huckabee himself have anything to hide? Well, according to here, there was “a 1998 story in the Arkansas Times detailing how Huckabee and his family were using the $60,000-a-year Governor's Mansion fund as their personal piggy bank.” If this story is true, I’ll bet that he didn’t want it too widely known that he was misusing “public funds”. (Yes, using-funds-for-purposes-not-directly-specified is misuse. I know: I took a course.)

So what’s the deal? Was anything illegal there? Don’t hold your breath to find out. We’ll probably never know. And besides, if Mick Huckabee becomes U.S. President, he can always pardon himself... Yes! He can pardon himself... But probably not in this case.