Spencer "Attackerman" Ackerman's made a post last night ("I Said I Said What I Said") on Bush fumbling announcing in Calgary yesterday plans for the book he intends to write.
"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened".
Not only is that gem hilarious and worthy of Ackerman's crowning it the, "Best. Freudian Slip. Ever.", but it is also laced with some serious irony courtesy of the Associated Press, because it has been scrubbed completely from the original AP story that put it out there in the first place.
The link that Ackerman provided to the story led to a TV News channel's site, WFMZ Pennsylvania/Jersey, containing the AP story (written by Rob Gillies) in which the president was quoted, however in reading the story I noticed that it no longer contained that quote.
I performed a Google phrase search on the quote and found results where the descriptions under the search results contain it, but the referring link did not, demonstrating that the Google site cache still contained the quote, but the referring links for that description reflected the revised story.
One of those search results (#8 in the Google returns at the time I wrote this) leads directly to the story on the AP's own site which doesn't contain the quote anymore. You can, however, see it at the NPR site and at the American Conservative, among other sites.
Neither the editors, nor Gillies, offer any note of explanation for the revision of the article. Is the quote accurate and did they purposely scrub it to avoid embarassing Bush? Or, did the AP mistype it themselves intending to type "authoritative" instead of "authoritarian"?
Mistakes happen, we know that, so if it were the latter, shouldn't they have issued some sort of note accompanying any revision of the original story? Also, why wouldn't they have just changed any mistake versus removing the entire quote?
Unfortunately Ackerman's contact link is broken, but I let FDL know about it and made a comment under his blog post. So far, it hasn't been updated.
I haven't seen any actual audio or video of the speech (anyone?) or a quote of it not based on the original AP source.
I'll keep looking but if anyone finds anything, let me know. I thought I would put it out there for discussion/investigation.