I pointed you to the Obama administration’s transition website the other day and said nice things about the potential of inclusion contained therein. Well, it looks like I spoke too soon. As of yesterday, two key pages at change.gov (technology, ethics) have disappeared without explanation. If you didn’t get a chance to view them last week, here are Google’s cached versions of ethics and technology (and just in case those go dark, I’ve got them cached here and here).
The Obama camp says the pages were taken down for “retooling“. I’m unconvinced. This is an incredibly web-savvy political apparatus. It shouldn’t take them this long to retool anything. I’m sorry to say this incident smacks of the secrecy and duplicity of the Bush administration under Cheney.
Am I borrowing trouble? Yes. I want you to steel yourselves to the possible reality that Obama may be nothing more than a great speaker who is just as in the pocket of the corporations as any other politician. Let’s just keep a wary eye cast on what Obama was advocating right out of the gate.
Nobody was holding Bush to this standard when he took office. Well, actually, we still didn’t have a President-Elect at this time in 2000. Antonin Scalia hadn’t voted yet. But these are the cards Obama has been dealt and honestly, there is nothing wrong with a citizenry becoming hyper-vigilant towards their government. In fact, it is about time we did!
Via BoingBoing