Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky; stormy weather…

The White House, citing—altogether now!—the confidentiality of executive branch communications, is refusing to provide documents related to Hurricane Katrina. They have also declined to allow senior White House officials, including chief of staff Andy Card, deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, domestic security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, and deputy domestic security adviser Ken Rapuano, to testify before either of two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.

It’s a move so outrageous even Joe Lieberman is mad.

"There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday's hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply…

"The White House and the administration are cooperating with both the House and Senate," [deputy White House spokesman Trent Duffy] said. "But we have also maintained the president's ability to get advice and have conversations with his top advisers that remain confidential."

Whatever. Let’s get real here. A president can get all the confidential advice and have all the confidential conversations he needs, and that confidentiality will be protected as long as no laws are broken and nothing goes wrong. But as soon as something does, especially on the catastrophic level of going-wrongness that was on display during Hurricane Katrina, we need to figure out what went wrong, where it went wrong, how and why it went wrong, so we can fix it, and who’s responsible, so we can hold them accountable for the lives that were lost. Preventing the same thing from happening again trumps confidentiality. Any leader with a shred of integrity would agree. End of story.

A pathetic side note from the same article:

The White House this week also formally notified Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, that it would not support his legislation creating a federally financed reconstruction program for the state that would bail out homeowners and mortgage lenders. Many Louisiana officials consider the bill crucial to recovery, but administration officials said the state would have to use community development money appropriated by Congress.

Nice.