November 26, 2013 03:59 PM UTC

New Coffman® Scrubs "Tea Party" References From Wikipedia

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• by: Colorado Pols

How are people are still making this amateur mistake? Buzzfeed:

Last year BuzzFeed reported on how congressional staffers had been editing members’ Wikipedia pages. House offices all share the same IP address. This makes it quite easy to find when people who work in Congress airbrush Wikipedia pages. BuzzFeed found 13 new examples since the first post…

And who do you suppose they found idiotically making edits to their congressional Wikipedia pages from that effortlessly traceable (and public) congressional IP address?

A section from the article “List of politicians affiliated with the Tea Party movement” was removed that said Republican Rep. Mike Coffman was associated with the tea party.

That's right! Colorado's own Rep. Mike Coffman, one of the most endangered GOP members of Congress heading into 2014, has been caught editing his Wikipedia page to remove references to his formerly proud membership in the Tea Party Caucus. The latest red-handed example, though there are likely others, took place as recently as September 20th of this year:

It's pretty stunning to see this error still being made by congressional staff. Buzzfeed's expose last year of congressional Wikipedia edits was bad enough. Coffman, as 9NEWS' Kyle Clark reminds us today, was the #1 offender of last year's story, for removing all reference to his infamous 2012 remarks about President Barack Obama's citizenship. When supporters of Sarah Palin ham-fistedly edited Paul Revere's entry to conform to Palin's faulty recounting of history, eyes rolled from coast to coast. At the very least, couldn't Coffman's staff wait until they are outside the Capitol to make these traceable edits? Use their phones? Something?

Especially since in "New Coffman's" case, one can hardly imagine a more embarrassing screwup?