This seems to be a pattern. Since Bush’s inauguration, there have been consistent instances in which federal agencies, which are supposed to be objective and impartial, have been used for political gain by Bush partisans.
Tom DeLay, for example, used civil servants at Bush’s Treasury Department to work up an attack of John Kerry’s tax plan. Bush appointees pressured officials in HHS to hide the truth about the White House Medicare plan. Questions have been raised about whether the CIA was misused in smearing Richard Clarke after he criticized the president’s counter-terrorism efforts. In April, we learned that Treasury has issued a series of controversial press releases with a Bush-campaign tagline.
And so I guess it should come as no surprise that federal officials are misusing agency websites to help attack John Kerry.
Searching for “Kerry” on the Department of Homeland Security’s Web site Tuesday afternoon turned up an unexpected top hit: a Republican attack on the Democratic presidential candidate.
A similar search on the Web site of the Department of Health and Human Services brought up the same link at the top — a news release from conservative Rep. C.L. Butch Otter, R-Idaho, that said a John Kerry administration “would embolden environmental extremists to press an aggressive agenda of restricting access and responsible use of public lands.”
The statement is posted on the Web site of the House Republican Conference,
www.gop.gov.
When the AP called the agencies to inquire why they were offering the public partisan attacks, officials seemed embarrassed.
“That is not supposed to be there and we are quite upset,” [HHS spokesman Bill] Hall said.
Both agencies pointed the finger at the government’s official Web portal, Firstgov.gov, which maintains their search engines.
[…]
Firstgov.gov, for its part, blamed the error on a technical glitch.
Glitch? I’m not a tech wiz, but it seems like quite a coincidence that the top result at both agency sites was a partisan attack against Kerry. What kind of glitch would produce that kind of “accident”?
Fortunately, the AP’s work on this story had a happy ending.
By 5:30 p.m. Tuesday the links in question no longer appeared on the HHS and DHS sites.