Is this straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, or much ado about nothing?
ChangeTracker, our handy tool that watches for changes on White House Web sites, noticed wide changes to the whitehouse.gov biography of George W. Bush.
References to Bush creating “prosperity” through “an ownership society” are stripped in the new version, and praise of the No Child Left Behind Act has been softened.
We contacted the White House for comment, and a spokesman told us that the version of the biography currently on Whitehouse.gov is actually not new, but an old one written at the end of the Bush administration.
Our research says otherwise. The biography preserved in the National Archives is a near-perfect match for the old version, suggesting that the version now on Whitehouse.gov is, indeed, new. (Peter Bray, founder of Versionista, the system that drives ChangeTracker, just wrote a piece in Slate about the changes.)
Politics and Critical Thinking finds the whole thing suspicious…
Is this standard practice or even a big deal? I don’t know, but for some reason I found this unsettling because of the sneakiness and denial. There is much truth in the statement, “To the victors go the spoils.” But that is usually left to a conqueror, not a publicly elected official. I just wonder how many more “changes” they are going to enact when it comes time to start covering for their failures?
Good question.
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