Department of Unsurprising Things Dept.

Hey, so remember how, during the campaign, that audio of Gov. Schwarzenegger talking about Bonnie Garcia and her "hot Latin blood" was leaked, and Arnold's campaign started claiming that their site was hacked, and launched a criminal investigation into the Angelides staffers who did it?

Funny story....

Some five months after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office kicked off a high profile criminal investigation of alleged computer hacking to determine how his private conversations ended up leaked to the press, a California Highway Patrol report has effectively cleared the campaign of Democrat Phil Angelides saying that there was no crime involved.

The 38-page CHP report, just released, says that the digital files of the governor's conversations were placed on a website that was "accessed by backwards browsing ... which does not constitute a crime."

Of course, we all knew that erasing the end of an URL and finding the parent directory was not hacking, but it took the CHP 5 months. Still, it seems like every time one of these things comes up, it turns into absolutely nothing several months down the road. Remember the Joe Lieberman site hack?

This wasn't a crucial part of the governor's race, but it actually was kind of a big deal, and the Schwarzenegger team was being righteously indignant the whole time, vowing to "get to the bottom of this larceny," etc. Once again, they were just blustering to cover up their own ineptitude. And they were directing police investigations for political purposes, and perhaps even delaying those investigations to avoid embarrassment. How typical.