By Judi McLeod ——Bio and Archives--November 9, 2015
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In the braggadocio of the 20 digital gurus who both created and continue to maintain President Barack Obama's omnipresent digital image, comes irrefutable proof of another Bill Clinton email lie:
From yesterday's New York Times: "He (Obama) "follows only 70 accounts on Twitter, mostly government agencies, members of his cabinet and senior staff, Chicago sports teams and Bill Clinton, (Emphasis CFP's).
If, as Obama's digital gurus claim in the 'Obama the Digital King' story that he follows Bill Clinton as one of 70 accounts on Twitter, then how can the former president's claims he only sent two electronic missives be true?"The former president says he only ever sent two electronic missives. Yeah, right. "Bill Clinton, the first United States president to send an email from the White House, is famous for practically never having used it. Clinton "sent a grand total of two emails as president," he said in a 2011 talk, a claim that has since been repeated widely. (Adrienne LaFrance, March 12, 2015) "Except it's not true."Are telling lies part of the Clinton family's DNA? Bill established his epic liar-hood with the plaintive statement: "I never had sex with that woman" when he lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky back in 1998, and has been in the liar's groove ever since.
"The email often cited as Clinton's first presidential email was a congratulatory note to astronaut John Glenn in 1998. The other, he said, was a note of support to troops in the Adriatic. "But there are other public records showing Clinton's early email trail. Like the fact that he had an AOL address in 1993, ClintonPz@aol.com, according to The Los Angeles Times that year. The very first message he sent as president was just a test--and there was some debate as to whether it even qualified as "electronic communication" for archival purposes since, as Reuters reported in 2004, its purpose was "to see if the commander in chief knew how to push the button on an e-mail." Here's how John Gibbons, who was the director of White House Science and Technology Policy in the Clinton administration, remembers it:Obama's 20 hotshot digital gurus were not out to prove Bill Clinton a liar in the New York Times story about how they created and now maintain Obama's digital image, but were only doing a little boasting about their online savvy. The story shows that Obama's compassion for so-called "clock boy" Ahmed Mohamed didn't exist, because the compassion originated not from a supposedly school boy-defending Obama, but only from the gurus who invented him. "From their office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Mr. Obama's aides determined that the president should swiftly tweet about the clockmaker, Ahmed Mohamed, whose distraught expression and handcuffed wrists were feeding a national debate about ethnic and religious profiling. (New York Times, Nov. 8, 2015)"[W]e wanted to introduce the President to email and the Net. So we brought him over to the old EOB, and he sat down in front of this computer--it may have been the first time he sat down in front of a computer--and showed him how email worked and gave him his email address over across the street in the Oval Office. So he typed in his first email message. It was something like, Bill Clinton, it's time to come home for lunch. Signed, Hillary, something like that. I saved a copy of it. That was his first email."The William J. Clinton Presidential Library claims to have just two emails from the former president in its trove of 40 million emails from the Clinton White House. He certainly sent more. Hillary, it seems, is not the only Clinton with disappearing emails."
"Cool clock, Ahmed," Mr. Obama said in a message posted on Twitter hours later from his personal account, @POTUS, to his nearly five million followers. "Want to bring it to the White House?" "Although the president seldom posts his own tweets, and White House officials would not say who wrote the one about Ahmed, the tweet reflected a push at the White House to build up a social media presence for Mr. Obama in his own voice. The goal is to bring a sense of spontaneity and accessibility to one of the world's most choreographed and constricted positions. "Leading the charge is Mr. Obama's Office of Digital Strategy, a team of roughly 20 aides who spend their days managing his Twitter account and the White House Facebook page, Instagram account and YouTube channel. "Led by Jason Goldman, a 39-year-old former executive at Twitter, Blogger and Medium, the team has a variety of tasks, including live-tweeting presidential speeches in 140-character squibs from the White House Twitter account and using analytics to track which issues may be most ripe for a web video or graphic and then producing them. "More than anything else, they are looking for ways to establish a digital identity for Mr. Obama. They say the old conventions of White House communications -- a major policy address, a television or newspaper interview or a written statement -- are less and less effective."The "clock boy" wasn't the first time the gurus used their talents to make Obama look compassionate:
"In November 2013, images of Miles Scott, a 5-year-old leukemia patient dressed as Batman fighting crime in his hometown, San Francisco, sparked an Internet outpouring, and Mr. Obama's aides thought "Batkid" should hear from the president. They used 30 seconds at the end of the weekly taping of Mr. Obama's Saturday radio address to have him record a six-second Vine, saying: "Way to go, Miles. Way to save Gotham." (New York Times) "Ultimately, what all of this is about is finding ways to communicate with people in a time when media has become so disaggregated that simply communicating through the traditional means is woefully insufficient," said Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama's former senior adviser and an architect of his digital strategy. "Social media can also be a powerful tool for burnishing the president's image with a sometimes-fickle public. One of the most viewed postings the White House has ever shared is a YouTube video of the president taking an impromptu stroll near the White House last year, quipping "the bear is loose" as he shook hands with awe-struck tourists."The creation of 'digital' presidents gets downright scary with the realization that "the rise of the Islamic State" as competition to Obama and not the horror of the rise of the Islamic State on human life was the motivator for the gurus getting him public attention:
"It was a time when "we were really getting beaten up, and there was no break in the narrative," said Mr. Pfeiffer, recalling how the rise of the Islamic State was capturing public attention. "And here we had this glimpse of the president as we all wished people could see him." (New York Times)Like the rest of him, Obama's digitalized image is one that deceives us.
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