Dollars and Sense

Reading Digby, I see this:

Here's the problem. The president pretended that he was disturbed by the leaks in the Plame case and said he wanted the perpetrator to come forward. Now we find out that he was personally authorizing the leak for political purposes. Scotty can call it "in the public interest" but everyone knows it was in the political interest of the president.

…and it suddenly occurs to me that, as taxpayers, we ought to begin petitioning the president to personally reimburse every last dime of the millions of dollars that Fitzy’s investigation has cost. That’s a pretty hefty price tag we’ve paid to allow him to hide the truth from us.

And to what end? If what he did was perfectly legal and in our best interest, as they’re arguing, there’s no reason he shouldn’t have come clean with it when it was first an issue. Our national security wasn’t dependent upon our not knowing that the president himself authorized the leak; his job security was. He directed tax dollars toward a long investigation, the express purpose of which was to delay us from finding out information that we might not like.

He used our money to enable his desire to lie to us. And I think we need to ask for it back, thank you very much.