Friday 23 January 2009

Brave new world.

If I were in charge of The White House's website, one of the things I would do would be to start a project to get transcriptions of all the past presidents' speeches up there. A lot of work, but, I think, worth it.

Obama, apparently the most Net-savvy president ever, appears to be taking the opposite approach: Whitehouse.gov's archives seem to have been purged of Dubya's speeches. For example, Google has this speech in its cache and says that the original should be at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031119-1.html, but that link is now being redirected to www.whitehouse.gov/briefing_room. Searching using Whitehouse.gov's own search engine, it really does look as if Bush's speeches have been not just moved but wiped.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I really don't think this bodes well.

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