The Progressive Truth

Friday, January 26, 2007

White House Manipulates SOTU Web Transcript

Once again the White House revisionists have manipulated history. As noted by Media Matters for America, the prepared text of Bush's SOTU speech did feature the phrase, "Democratic majority," but instead Bush actually congratulated what he called the "Democrat majority". Now the White House website's "official transcript" of the SOTU speech has been changed from "Democratic" to "Democrat".

Here are snapshots (here and here) of the original transcript from State of the Union.com and the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access (U.S. Government Printing Office), respectively. Compare them to the now revised White House transcript, here (snapshot) and here (snapshot).

From Media Matters:

"The ungrammatical conversion of the noun "Democrat" to an adjective was the brainchild of Republican partisans, presumably an attempt to deny the opposing party the claim to being "democratic."
This is not the first time the White House has revised history in such an Orwellian fashion. See here, here, and here for more examples.