In the running for November
An early contender for the November 2003 Perfidy Prize for Inadvertant or Vertant Asshattery is our own President's staff. From Calpundit:
THE MEMORY HOLE RE-REVISITED....First we had the White House scouring their website for headlines that said "combat operations" in Iraq were over and changing them to say "major combat operations" were over. You know, because the original got kind of embarrassing when American soldiers kept dying.Then the White House webmasters blocked Google from caching all Iraq-related documents, but they seemed to have a good explanation for that so I let it slide.
But yesterday there was more historical revision: an interview in which an administration official said reconstruction would cost no more than $1.7 billion was mysteriously deleted from the USAID website.
Now, today, Josh Marshall reports that the White House altered the transcript of a presidential speech in a way that completely changes the meaning of what he said. Just one teensy little letter, though!
Is there an innocent explanation? Sure, maybe. But considering the track record here, I'm sure as hell not giving these guys the benefit of the doubt on it anymore.
Me either. My favorite thing this weekend was watching Rumsfeld on the news shows. I have never seen a man so adept at making me feel so stupid, so stupid! for remembering things differently than him, with his strained grin hinting at barely restrained contempt sitting there trying to work a Jedi Mind Trick on the whole nation. Breathtaking!
[wik] Mark A. R. Kleiman writes more about this. He notes that the change-- which made "We see a China that is stable and prosperous" into "We seeK"-- merely follows a similar formulation elsewhere in the article. But this is a public document, and my sense is that Bush's people tend to treat the historical record like a poorly-run weblog, editing text and changing arguments where convenient without a thought of flagging that the update was made. Not a hanging offense, but not something I want in a President either.
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I didn't see the original
I didn't see the original live speech, but if they were correcting what was in essence a typo in the transcipt, that's really not a bad thing. If Mark Kleiman is defending the admin on this, it can't be that bad.
I remember the other original Bush speech, and as I recall he did say "Major Combat Operations."
M.A.R.K draws the same larger
M.A.R.K draws the same larger conclusion that I do; edits/corrections deserve a flag, especially ones in such a public forum. I typically publish an article at least twice, and edit it in the five minutes between the first and second publication without a note. But if it's up long enough for folks to read, I flag it.
It's common sense.
I agree with you there - but
I agree with you there - but it does not imply malicious intent to deceive the gullible american public.
It would be too much fun, not
It would be too much fun, not to mention misleading, to re-invoke Godwin's malice/stupidity axis here.
So I will just say that the presence or absence of malice for the American public is not this issue. It's a sign of an ethos to which I object, in which the past is even more plastic than it already is.