-By Warner Todd Huston
Our old friend Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post Staff writer, is at it again with her latest outbreak of Bush Derangement Syndrome. This time she and the Washington Post have teamed up to try to paint the Bush White House as technological Neanderthals in theirs headlined “Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages.”
The headline alone tells readers that those poor, poor Obama staffers have come in expecting to get right to work only to find it a mess thanks to Bush’s failure to update the tech capacity of the White House. Only, that impression would be simply incorrect. Bush was restricted by certain laws and rules that prevented him from bringing White House operations into the I-Phone age.
Kornblut continues the charade in the first few paragraphs.
If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.
Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.
What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.
If this was all that a reader took in before moving on, it would be easy to be misinformed. The truth is that, instead of simply not bothering to upgrade, the Bush administration had legal reasons and budgetary concerns that prevented them from turning the White House into a shiny Apple Store.
To Kornblut’s credit she then went into the messy failure of the purported most transparent administration in history for updating the Obama wepages that are supposed to show America his actions and schedule. Kornblut properly notes that the lack of updating as promised was not quite in keeping with campaign rhetoric. “Nor did the site reflect the transparency Obama promised to deliver,” Kornblut said.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the end of the story that we finally see Kornblut admitting that the lack of a tech paradise in the White House is partly due to the legal issues that force this luddite existence on the president’s office.
Senior advisers chafed at the new arrangements, which severely limit mobility — partly by tradition but also for security reasons and to ensure that all official work is preserved under the Presidential Records Act.
This is the main reason that George W. Bush ceased using email and computers once he became president. Chances are President Blackberry will eventually find that he will have to suffer the same no-computers fate in many more ways than he wants to.
Let’s face reality about computers and the president, any president. Thanks to the over use of the attack dogs called “special prosecutors,” and the overweening interference of the Executive Branch by Congress, no president is even going to bother using e-mail and computers very much once they realize the troubles it will bring.
In May of 2008, Bush even claimed that he looks forward to using e-mail to contact friends and family again after he leaves office. In a report on the president’s remarks, a New York Times blog reported that “Mr. Bush stopped e-mailing when he entered the White House, citing security worries, and the Oval Office does not have a computer in it.”
Unfortunately, Kornblut does not elucidate these salient points well favoring casting President Bush as a computer illiterate.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, Human Events Magazine, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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