After all the left wing vandalism of May Day, I’ve just been doing a little Internet research about the vandalism in the White House when Bill Clinton’s aides were preparing to turn the place over to their Republican successors. There are any number of web pages on the subject, most of then on leftist sites. If you google the words “Clinton aides trashed the White House,” the first dozen or so hits are pages on left wing sites, all declaring that the White House vandalism story was a hoax perpetrated by lying conservatives.

The liberal side of the story is that the government’s General Accounting Office investigated the claims of vandalism, and exonerated the Clinton people completely. It’s telling that none of the leftist pages I read, that made this claim about the GAO report, had a link to the actual report.

Here it is: the GAO report on White House vandalism by Clinton aides. The first few sentences of the Conclusions section read like this: “Damage, theft, vandalism, and pranks occurred in the White House complex during the 2001 presidential transition. Incidents such as the removal of keys from computer keyboards; the theft of various items; the leaving of certain voice mail messages, signs, and written messages; and the placing of glue on desk drawers clearly were intentional acts. However, it was unknown whether other observations, such as broken furniture, were the result of intentional acts, when and how they occurred, or who may have been responsible for them.”

Some exoneration.

According to the report, about a quarter of the four hundred White House offices that were being vacated by Clinton staff suffered damage of one kind or another.

The other shoe dropped eight years later, when the Bush staff vacated the White House in January of 2009. Demonstrating once again that conservatives have more respect than liberals for other people’s property, the Bushies left a neat clean White House behind them for the Obama team. No one in or around the White House has reported a single incidence of vandalism from that Republican-to-Democrat transition.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the White House if and when Mitt Romney defeats President Obama this November. Democrats and their supporters continue to show that they are not particularly uncomfortable with vandalism, as evidenced by their support for the Occupy movement. The SEIU is actually paying $4,000 per month to provide Occupy DC with office space in our nation’s capital, and one can only wonder why.