Same Gaffes, but Now on Twitter

[Commentary] Richard Nixon did some terrible things in order to maintain a grip on the Oval Office, but the dumbest may have been recording what went on there. Nowadays, the hidden recorder is no longer necessary: the Internet has become the Rose Mary Woods of the digital age, dutifully transcribing every wiggle and wobble of the people who hold office.

Public officials are being ambiently recorded, one way or another, regardless of whether they intend to be. Extensive efforts were expended over the weekend to comb through Sarah Palin’s e-mails from her time as the governor of Alaska. Ms. Palin may have thought that she was just chatting with her staff and friends, but now every comma, every aside, every random thought is being picked apart for meaning. There may have been some legitimate news buried in the trove of e-mails, and she remains a person of significant public interest. So the press response makes sense, but she could not be blamed for feeling that she was under attack from a horde of biting ants. “A lot of those e-mails obviously weren't meant for public consumption,” she told Chris Wallace of Fox News, where she is a source, a commentator and a subject, all wrapped into one. As it turns out, the 24,000 pages of e-mails that journalists and the public spent the weekend poring through contained nothing notable — quite an achievement that Palin seems guilty of nothing more than the excessive use of exclamation points. But the results are beside the point. She is of interest not because of what she did as governor but because she has almost perfected the modern hybrid of politician and celebrity: once your daughter appears on “Dancing With the Stars,” your celebrity is far more important that your position on off-shore drilling. That means that all those e-mails are destined for public consumption whether she likes it or not.