There was a minor scandal this week involving the forces of light and darkness mucking around with Barack Obama's Wikipedia page. America's citizen scholars kept adding stuff exposing the president as a Kenyan sleeper spy with a fake birth certificate. Wikipedia, under orders from ACORN and Al-Qaeda, kept erasing it. Our friends in the crankosphere picked up the story as more evidence that they were always being silenced and, as usual, they won't shut up about it.
Here's the line that came and went:
"There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts."
This, of course, is just crazy talk. And you can see why it got scrubbed. It's not Wikipedia's job to peddle paranoid hearsay. That's Townhall's job. Wikipedia's job is to be written at a seventh grade reading level and be about half as useful as the Columbia Desk Encyclopedia on all subjects except Joss Whedon's Firefly.
It also turned out that the reporter who was blowing the whistle on the wiki-perfidy was the same nincompoop who had had the lines inserted in the first place.
And "Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories" has its very own Wikipedia entry that goes on and on and on and on.
So the scandal blew over.
But here's how I was personally touched by the story:
This sad sack shell of a human being named Meg Whitman wants to be governor of California. I wrote a post pointing out that her qualifications for high public office include a pattern of management positions in companies that run Asian sweatshops. To my childlike delight, this observation was added to her Wikipedia entry. Then, to my adultlike chagrin, the observation was removed.
And someone cut the brakes on my Civic.
No they didn't.
Because it's not the Pentagon Papers. It's just Wikipedia.
When you do a Google search for an American politician, the first two results are the site they run themselves and Wikipedia. Everyone knows this Wikipedia page is constantly rewritten by the politician's staff and constantly unwritten by the Asperger cases who police Wikipedia like it's their job.
But it's not a conspiracy. It's not even censorship. It's just the way things are.
By the way, I'm not lying about the sweatshops. You could look it up.
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Extra Credit
From the "Educational Excellence" entry on Meg Whitman's own, authorized, wonderful semi-literate website:
"We must not only respect great teachers; we must reward them. We should focus resources on delivering the best classroom instruction to all children, regardless of where their station in life."
To which our former president might add:
Regardless of where their station in life, rarely is the question asked: Is they learning?