In the last year, the U.S. government has been under harsh criticism for many things, two of which being the overall setup and implementation of the Obamacare website and former Director of IRS Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner’s emails miraculously disappearing as the investigation begins as to whether the agency specifically targeted conservative groups.
With the Obamacare website, we were fed every excuse for its failings just short of calling it a “doohickey” that just doesn’t want to work. But really, it was like a parent accidentally clicking on obvious malware and listening to them try to convince you they didn’t when it all went to hell.
Government officials – most notably former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius – were left scratching their heads, wondering why it kept crashing, why nothing was working the way it was supposed to and just why in the world people were so darn angry in the first place. Every day, you were just waiting for someone to step to a podium and say, “We didn’t press anything! We just sat down and it started acting all weird! We swear it was working fine yesterday.”
Now, as the heat comes down on the IRS, we are being told that the emails were simply erased, along with Lerner’s entire hard drive. Oh, and her computer crashed, and the company backing up the agency’s data didn’t have those emails, either. They were simply lost into the nether regions of that dadgum Internet.
Except our overbearing parents once again did something wrong, know they did, and desperately want to blame it on something vague that could never actually happen. Because the last thing they want to be called is technologically-impaired.
It’s been painful listening to those in the government try to explain what’s wrong with their technology. It has morphed into a mightily confused, exasperated parent and we are its children, desperately trying to figure out what in the world our parent is talking about when, naturally, we have somewhere to be in the next ten minutes.
Luckily, the government is more or less a parent we don’t respect, and we can take it to task when we know it did something wrong. Rather than calmly fixing the error and nodding in agreement that “yeah, that is weird how the computer just started randomly erasing files,” we can fight back and try to expose the wrongdoing without fear of being guilt-tripped into oblivion.
