Obama's White House Web Site Still Breaks Millions of Links

When (or slightly before) Obama became President, his people broke millions of links to historical transcripts and videos, removing them from the White House web site. For example, this link to President Bush's so-called "Mission Accomplished" speech. It's just gone.

This sort of loss is intolerable. It matters. And yes, I know you can still find the content in various archives. But maintaining the links themselves are crucial. These are the footnotes and bibliography of much of the Bush years.

What should happen is simple: first, Obama's people should a new whitehouse.gov hierarchy for historical documents, perhaps ordered by year, perhaps by President's name, whatever. So for example, http://www.whitehouse.gov/bush-43/news/releases/. Put all of Obama's content in a similar location, http://www.whitehouse.gov/obama-44/news/releases/. Then all of the Bush content should be restored to that locations. Next, all existing URLs to /news/releases/.. should be automatically redirected to the Bush archives. Do the same for Clinton if necessary. And when Obama is gone, his replacement won't have to do anything to keep those historical records alive: they will remain in that location.

This really is important.