Agree completely. The President always takes the high road and gets skewered by the Rats for doing so. I get so upset with his focusing on good intentions such that he loses in the PR wars. I suspect its his belief in the Lord and the idea that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But it still infuriates me that he does strike back more often than he does.
Maybe the Whitehouse had plans to use the memos in a manner that did not include public disclosure. I can imagine a scenario where some deputy undersecretary's aide has a private conversation with the commission members vis-a-vis the memos. It actually might have had more impact on the commission to do it privately than to allow the biased media to run interference for them. Usual human nature is to fear the unknown more than the known. If it had been done as a private matter, the commission members would fear what might happen if it became public.