Those who forget to revise history...

Damned if they're not up to it again.

Last Tuesday, I posted a brief entry about how the Bush White House was caught "revising history". That is to say, the White House changed press releases from May 2003 about the announcement of the end of combat operations in Iraq from ending "combat operations" to ending "major combat operations." [link]

Now I see that Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, has caught the Bush White House in another example of "massaging" the record. The offending change this time was in the official transcript of a speech that President Bush made to the Australian Parliament when he was in Asia last month. According to the transcript released by the White House at the time, Bush said that "We see a China that is stable and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people." That sentence, of course, is fairly significant endorsement of China's policies, and, incidentally, a change in U.S. foreign policy. Apparently, it may have also been an error by Bush. According to Marshall's sources, the President was supposed to say "We seek a China that is stable and prosperous," etc. That's a very different statement.

So how did the White House handle it? Well, as Marshall points out, they simply edited the transcript, without any indication that it was ever different. Now, if you go to the White House website, the official transcript says "seek" and not "see", even though, of course, the idea of a transcript is to record what was actually said, not what was intended to be said. In any event, thanks to Josh Marshall, who made a PDF file of the original, we can see the edit for ourselves. Please visit Marshall's site, and give him the proper credit for his investigative journalism. [link] [Marshall has recently posted an update on this story here]

I said it before, but it bears repeating. The web sees all, so if you're thinking about trying to cover your tracks when you make a misstatement, it's probably going to come back and bite you in the ass, because someone saw your original and made a copy of it.