There's nothing quite like getting caught with your pants down in such a humiliating fashion when you're a politician as finding out that your staffers have been running a half-assed 1984-esque "Ministry of Truth" style campaign to erase information about you online.
WASHINGTON -- The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia," The Sun has learned.
The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.
Just in case anyone is finding this news flash to be a little bit hard to believe, Wikipedia has posted examples of the incriminating evidence for us to look at. In fact, they have assembled a veritable laundry list of malfeasanse committed by users originating from the House of Representatives' network. Now I know that someone may argue that this is just some elaborate attempt to make some members of Congress look like a bunch of lowlife scum, but clearly that is not the case when you look at the kinds of information that were removed by the staffers. There isn't a whole lot of information about who was involved at this point the game, but it doesn't look good for the staffers and the people that they work for because one could imagine that if a FBI agent or two came a knocking, the congresscritters in question would happily throw their staffers to the wolves in order to save their hides and some face.
Then, there's this:
Wikipedia's online honor system has made it ripe for abuse by vandals. Recently, a user wrote in a Wikipedia bio that Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor "smells of cow dung." Another wrote that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is "ineffective." These statements were traced to the House Internet-protocol (IP) address.
This is where your tax dollars are getting allocated. While we have billions of dollars in deficit, and our illustrious leaders are finding time to tell us that there is no more pork that can be cut from the budget, their staffers are tirelessly attacking the public record and defaming each others' bosses on the public's time. You are paying for their jabs at one another at the expense of Wikipedia's integrity.
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