Yesterday, after the Democrats sent two subpoenas to White House officials, including one for Karl Rove, and issued their first formal call for a special prosecutor to look into Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales’ apparent perjury in Senate testimony, Fox News/White House spokesman Tony Snow, rushed to the cameras to complain:

“We’ve had more than 600 oversight hearings, 87,000-plus hours spent responding to oversight requests and 430,000 pages made available to Congress for oversight,” Snow said, adding that the investigations have yet to reveal any wrongdoing.

“Look at all the pages here. Look at all the hearings. This is … it is as if they keep throwing mud against the wall, hoping something’s going to stick,” the spokesman said.

“At this point, we have hundreds of hearings that have produced bubkes,” Snow stated. “And what has happened is, that there has generated this idea, ‘Let’s go on a fishing expedition and let’s haul somebody up, and let’s make insinuations without having firm proof.’ And what that does is it creates a toxic atmosphere.”

Tony Snow was, of course, covering Washington as a journalist in the 1990s, which means he is being more than disingenuous here. He certainly knows that during the Clinton Administration, the Republican-controlled Congress spent at least $100 million of the taxpayers’ dollars investigating the Clinton administration, including $40 million spent by Ken Starr alone. And then there was Whitewater, Filegate, the Rose Law Firm billing records, the death of Vince Foster (three separate investigations), on and on and on. And they really did come up with bubkes.

Snow may have forgotten the 1990s but Democratshave not:

PAUL BEGALA, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: When I was working in the Clinton White House, one committee alone, the House Government Reform Committee, issued a thousand subpoenas to Clinton administration officials. A hundred and forty-one different people were subpoenaed.

As we noted in 2005, The Republicans even investigated Socks, the cat:

[In 1995] Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), then chair of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, investigated whether taxpayers were footing the cost of stationery and postage for the fan club dedicated to President Clinton’s cat, Socks. (They were not - and it turns out Barbara Bush’s dog Millie had a fan club too.)

For all the millions of dollars they wasted — forget about the time they wasted as the 9/11 clock was counting down — the Republicans turned up nothing because the Clintons were not guilty of anything.

Conversely, George W. Bush deliberately misled the country into war. He has authorized torturing prisoners and the leaking the name of a covert CIA agent. More importantly, he has also admitted to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act dozens of times — a federal offense that has never been investigated by Congress, and for which he should be turned out of office.

This president has committed serious offenses, and yet he sends his flack out to cry about a few subpoenas.

What a wimp.