Down the Memory Hole

The Obama administration has take over whitehouse.gov. That’s annoying, because it means all the self-congratulatory articles about Bush that used to dominate the site are now gone. I tried to find a backup somewhere, but it looks like there’s no way to access ‘100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration” anymore. Wish I’d saved a copy yesterday…

I thought maybe the Republican Party website would have a copy, so I checked there. Nope. I did find this interesting section – in the section on “Republican Party History", there’s this paragraph:

‘Presidents during most of the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were Republicans. The White House was in Republican hands under Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush. Under the last two, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the United States became the world's only superpower, winning the Cold War from the old Soviet Union and releasing millions from Communist oppression.’
 

Notice someone missing? That’s right, the GOP history page doesn’t mention Bush the Lesser anywhere! (He does have a section under ‘party leadership’ – though presumably that’ll be gone once they update the page to reflect his leaving office.) Then again, the Republican website in general seems uncomfortable with current affairs; Lincoln and Teddy Roosvelt get their own pages, but nobody else. ‘Republican Women’ only discusses suffragettes. ‘Leading the Way on Issues’ only covers that highly controversial issue of opposition to slavery. Reading their history sections, you’d be forgiven for believing the Republican Party disbanded sometime in the 1920s…

While I agree with the party’s apparent belief that the Republican Party hasn’t done anything praise-worthy in decades, if not a century, and can certainly understand why they’d want their last leader quietly erased from history… it’s a little odd they don’t at least try to put a positive spin on things.

We Are All Americans... Apparently

I had a very snarky post written up concerning the Obama inauguration, but I thought better of it and didn’t post it.

One thing though – did tonight’s news really need to be 95%+ inauguration? I’m fairly sure they didn’t devote this much time to Kevin Rudd’s swearing in. Hard as it may be to remember, Obama is, in fact, a foreign head of state, not the new World-Emperor.

And if you are going to devote that much time to a foreign change of government, at least offer some analysis? Some context? Something more than “Wow, there’s a lot of people in Washington” and “People elsewhere in the US watched the inauguration… on TV! Wow!”. Closest to actual reporting we got was one idiot ‘expert’ explaining that Obama plans on focusing on ‘smart power’. Well, that’ll be a welcome change, but that doesn’t exactly mean anything unless you explain what he’s planning on achieving with that power, yes?