From the Ministry of Truth...

[lederhosen]

[Edit: fixed broken HTML]

Seems everybody's favourite miserable failure has been retroactively altering his press releases to alter references to "end of combat in Iraq" to "end of major combat in Iraq".

Compare the title of this updated version of a May 1 press release with the original (see footnote #18 here.)

(This page has some more material on this, including before-and-after screenshots.)

Unfortunately, the White House has recently altered their robots.txt file to block Google from indexing & caching a whole bunch of sites on their pages, so future retcons may be a little harder to catch.

On the bright side, I hear the chocolate ration is to be increased.

Comments

[panacea1.livejournal.com]

On the bright side, I hear the chocolate ration is to be increased.

From 75 up to 50 grams! Yay!

[scascot.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just me, but I've always heard Shrubya's remarks referred to as announcing "the end of major combat." From day one, when the news was reported on NBC. But, that may just be my faulty recollection.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

AFAICT - my web connection is flaky this morning, so I'm going on recollection of what I looked at last night - Bush did actually say "major combat" at the time. But the White House press releases reporting that speech (from which a lot of journalists would have taken their cue) headlined "Bush announces end of combat in Iraq".

On its own, that's fairly trivial. White House press releases are very carefully vetted before they go out, but maybe somebody just got sloppy and trimmed 'major' from the headline.

In context, though... one of the tactics I've seen the White House using a lot lately is to *encourage* people to mishear them. Let people think you said "Iraq sponsored the 9-11 attacks", and when they report it that way don't correct the mistake. That way you can get the general public to believe what you want them to believe... and yet, you can't be accused of lying.

In that light, I get rather uneasy when the press release dated "May 1, 2003" doesn't actually match the one that was issued on May 1, 2003 and makes no mention of the change. Doubly so when the White House have recently altered their robots.txt in such a way as to make it harder to catch such retcons next time around.