Apparently, last Friday, I committed the ultimate sin in the liberal blogging world: I questioned a government program. "Cash for clunkers" had some Orwellian wording in it that was quite honestly, pretty creepy and just by bringing that up, the liberal blogs went nuts.
"Oh, Glenn! You and your crazy conspiracies!"
But here's The One Thing: If disagreeing with creepy wording in the "cash for clunkers" is crazy, then apparently the government is crazy too — because they agreed with me.
Even though partisan hacks will tell you otherwise, there's nothing wrong with demanding answers on these giant government programs, watching what the government is up to and holding them accountable is exactly what we should be doing.
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I've been trying to wake people up on that front and through our constitutional watchdogs, I am seeing just how awake you guys really are. We're getting so many leads — like the one in the "cash for clunkers" program. When dealers logged in to apply for the cash part of the "cash for clunkers" program, the site cars.gov/dealership prompted them with the warning:
"This application provides access to the DOT CARS system. When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a federal computer system and is property of the United States government... users have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy."
"Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected and disclosed to authorized CARS, DOT and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign."
"By using this system, the user consents to such interception, monitoring, recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion CARS or the DOT personnel."
Why in God's name would you click "accept" to that? I mean, other than you just sold a bunch of cars at a wildly discounted rate and need to make your money back.
Apparently, you and I aren't the only ones who thought this was ridiculous. I have some good news — we received a statement today from the DOT and here it is:
"A security warning on the CARS.gov dealer support page that stated computers logged into the system were considered property of the federal government has been removed. We are working to revise the language. The language was posted on the portion of the Web site accessible by car dealers and not the general public."
The blogs had a field day making fun of me — "Oh, that crazy Glenn Beck is at it again!' But apparently, we must have a decent point, otherwise why would the government remove the old statement? Liberal bloggers spent another dateless weekend defending this crap and then the government agreed with us and changed the wording.
Of course, questions remain unanswered: Why did they have that wording in the first place? We don't know yet. But I'm confident we'll find out, because today you proved that one person can make a difference.
Step back for a second and look what happened: White House policy was changed — not by me — but by one single person. One person who was so fed up with an out-of-control government they decided to be a constitutional watchdog and now things are changed for better.
Good job — keep it up.
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