Jane Galt’s political analysis of the stolen Democratic memo strikes me as acute. (Though I don’t share her confidence that Orrin Hatch didn’t know the memos were stolen, as opposed to not having known they were stolen cybernetically; where did he think they came from?)
Jane is right: this won’t make much of a scandal in the public mind. But her essay never considers the question about whether it should make such a scandal. I think it should. Stealing informatin from a computer is a felony. Senate staffers shouldn’t run around committing felonies.
(And Jane is clearly wrong when she says that “almost any really juicy piece of political news was obtained illegally.” It’s not a crime to tell a reporter something your boss wishes the public will never discover. In the national security area, some of the “juicy news” does, indeed, involve the release of classified information, which is in many cases illegal even when it shouldn’t be. But this is hardly in the same category.)