You know, quite often I find myself equating the Bush White House with the old Soviet Union — the constant secrecy, the intolerance of dissent… hell, Dubya never speaks in public, only in front of a carefully vetted audience that cheers every word. He never reads newspapers. He lives in a tiny little perfect world his handlers have created for him. Sounds like an old Soviet premier to me.
Anyway. Just as the Soviets did, the Bushies like to re-edit their own history and delete items that don’t reflect their current policies:
Is the White House scrubbing its Web site?
Helen Dewar and Brian Faler write in The Washington Post about the mystery of the disappearing Coalition of the Willing — and more.
“Blogger Brad Friedman, who noticed the disappearance, believes this is part of a widespread ‘scrubbing’ of documents on the government site. Gone are links to the audio and video of President Bush’s statement that ‘I’m not that concerned’ about Osama bin Laden, a Q&A when Bush said ‘misunderestimate’ and Bush’s acknowledgment that his decision making on stem cell policy was ‘unusually deliberative for my administration.’
“Jimmy Orr, who handles the content for the White House site, said nothing nefarious was intended. ‘We have some 80,000 pages and 3,000 video and audio links,’ he said. ‘When we republish pages and move files, some links are bound to go down, and there are bound to be dead pages.’ “
For the record, the March 2001 press conference where Bush first said “misunderestimate” is in fact on the site; the transcript just says “mis-understimate” instead. Using Google, I found another version of the coalition list on the Web servers, for those of you who are curious. And the July 2001 press conference where Bush spoke about his unusual deliberation is in fact also on line. But the other stuff is indeed missing.
