I see this as largely coincidental, and nothing nefarious. If you follow the link from the page to the archived version [1], look among the dozens of subjects, click on Ethics, scroll down to near the bottom of the page, you'll see the single paragraph he's referring to. It makes up for about 0.1% of the total content. It's unlikely the administration took down an entire website just to hide Obama's whistleblower promises.
What's more likely is that that, since Hope/Change was the old slogan and "Forward" has replaced it as the new slogan, it's time to take down the old site because it's simply outdated.
C'mon guys let's show a little critical thought and stop looking for conspiracies where they don't exist. It's bad for our credibility. Things are bad enough as it is with the stuff the NSA is actually doing.
Let's take that one step further. The October 2012 Obama and the January 2013 Obama were apparently entirely different people. In fact he didn't just change - during the 2012 campaign, he actively lied. He made statements about how transparent his government is and how he is all about protecting our rights etc., while presiding over programs in direct conflict with those statements.
>It's unlikely the administration took down an entire website just to hide Obama's whistleblower promises.
No, they did it to hide ALL the promises and old texts.
>What's more likely is that that, since Hope/Change was the old slogan and "Forward" has replaced it as the new slogan, it's time to take down the old site because it's simply outdated.
Yes, clearly in the US now, hope and change are outdated. We must just go forward as things are.
Are you seriously accepting this graciously? This marketing BS is exactly the kind of thing politicians do when they are not for real, but BS marketeers and spin doctors.
>C'mon guys let's show a little critical thought and stop looking for conspiracies where they don't exist.
Emm, what conspiracy? This is what BS politicians do all the time. Retract their promises and update the websites so that people are not reminded of them.
I suspect that you are right about this being innocuous. What I think makes this a "hot" story is not the intentionality, but that it reminds us how divorced campaign promises are from the actions a president takes in office.
gets on soap-box
Maybe the candidates aren't even lying outright. Maybe it's like when I'm estimating programming effort: I can really really believe in the estimate I give, but unless I look at how long similar projects took me or others in the past, the planning fallacy[1] gets me every. single. time. A similar thing for candidates would probably be to look at how much actual change previous presidents were able to bring about and assume that those presidents were just as smart and trying just as hard.
Of course even with a realistic estimate, there is another problem I constantly run into, and I imagine candidates do as well: Once you have a realistic estimate of what you can do, how do you compete with someone who over-promises?
One thing I found with programming is that clients who were previously burned by over-promising are somewhat inoculated against it. This doesn't seem to be the case for elections though. Does anybody have any other ideas?
I also agree that this is coincidental. There is no reason to connect what a politician says they represent with what they actually represent.
A more innocent website would involve a random slogan generator.
It's unlikely there was intent to cover something up regarding Obama's whistleblower promises because it's unlikely there was ever any connection between his promises and his actions.
Have the qualifications for "conspiracy" been gradually ratcheted down until it's just synonymous with "implying that someone in government did something without the public's best interests at heart"?
I'm not sure how taking down your own website because some of its positions don't accord with your current actions counts as either far-fetched or a conspiracy.
I have a fool-proof way to test your retarded theory: (and I call it retarded only because its the best word in the modern human lexicon to discuss such topics of self-delusion)
Why don't we make a non-stop replaying channel of all the ridiculous bullshit propaganda campaign promises that Obama (and all other campaigning politicians) tells us, for everyone to see. Make it time-stamped, tagged, listed, searchable and correlated to their current actions - let people vote comment and review all things said.
After all - are we not for open-source code, which allows us to review for bugs and malicious code?
We need open-source politics that allows for the same.
What do you think the wayback machine is? As for calling other posters retarded (and a poster who is generally on the same side as you on these issues, at that) - don't.
Retarded is really the best word you could come up with?
Most mentally retarded people I've met are quite aware that they're significantly less smart than the average person, and have internalized it quite well. Have you ever seen an 8-year-old burst into tears because the rest of his class can read, but he can't, no matter how hard he tries?
Unfortunately, self-delusion generally isn't one of the ways mental retardation presents.
I've noticed this too, to some extent. and I don't think its purely because of the President's party. TDS writers and Jon used to work hard to hold politicians feet to the fire no matter their party, and in the past few years I've seen them become increasingly outright liberal.
Sure, that change happened around the same time as Obama, but I argue that the Daily Show of old would have been less coddling to the current administration.
What's more likely is that that, since Hope/Change was the old slogan and "Forward" has replaced it as the new slogan, it's time to take down the old site because it's simply outdated.
C'mon guys let's show a little critical thought and stop looking for conspiracies where they don't exist. It's bad for our credibility. Things are bad enough as it is with the stuff the NSA is actually doing.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20130515024407/http://change.gov/...