I was delighted to notice this evening that the drug czar’s blog, Pushingback.com seems to have removed every post written prior to Obama’s inauguration. What was formerly one of the web’s greatest collections of unhinged drug war propaganda now houses only 3 posts. It’s an epic massacre of wretched crap that should never have been written in the first place.

Classic embarrassments such as the fake map of San Francisco, the crazy 'burrito taster' poster, and the time they lied about their web traffic are gone forever, along with every other annoying artifact of former drug czar John Walters’s tragic flirtations with new media. I’m sure it’s all archived somewhere, but it’s probably best left to rot unless you’re making a documentary called Worst Drug Czar Ever.

The archives of Pushingback.com are basically a map of everything ONDCP has been up to for the last couple years. It was the single best source for following the drug czar’s speeches, photo-ops, programs and propaganda. Suddenly, all of John Walters horrible accomplishments are erased and the bloggers who’ve been picking away at him for years are left with a bunch of dead links.

The big question is how this came about. I’d really love to know whose executive decision it was to take out John Walters’s garbage. I spot-checked a couple other government blogs and found Bush administration posts still available, even on divisive topics such as foreign policy. For now, it looks like the purge at Pushingback.com isn’t just a matter of out with the old, in with the new.

If someone in the new administration thinks we don’t need this crap anymore, they’re damn right.

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