Submitted by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog [6],
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
- George Orwell, 1984
President Transparency, in the interest of protecting his Administration’s spotless record of least transparent ever, has decided to erase sections of his original campaign website so that inconvenient and broken promises (i.e., every single thing he said) can’t be so easily exposed. Although clearly no one goes to the campaign site for groundbreaking news, it had served as a useful platform to compare candidate Obama to the George W. Bush clone he has become as President. From Policy Mic:
In a recent blog post by the Sunlight Foundation [7], the watchdog organization curiously notes how the Obama administration has removed previously available content from then candidate Obama’s famous 2008 campaign platform, Change.gov [8]. While the site has long since served as a landing page to redirect traffic towards the now President Obama’s whitehouse.gov [9], the content of the website, particularly the materials and agenda pages, has always been accessible. However, very recently, access to such information is now no longer supported through the site and appears to have been “scrubbed” off the internet (of course, you can still access archived forms [10] of the aforementioned pages).
Thus, because President Obama’s policies have failed to match candidate Obama’s campaign platform (particularly the change part of “hope and change”), it is possible that the easy availability of such contradictory information, not to mention the reputability of the source, has proven to be too detrimental to President Obama’s reputation — given the current political climate. More specifically, the President’s views on government ethics and whistle blowing:
The following was candidate Obama’s position on whistleblowers.
Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
No worries, at least we still have the right to go out into the street and mindlessly scream USA! USA!
Full article here [11].