Jeremy wrote:
] But let me not join the summarizers. Invest a
] half-hour in reading this moving exposition of the noble goal
] of American foreign policy.

How about joining the misquoters. I scanned this article, and saw this: "West Bank leaders who are "the main obstacles to peace."" Regardless of what you think of the Palestinian leadership, it is supremely arrogant to call one side of a military conflict the "main obstacles to peace" unless you are really talking about a case where that side has absolutely no legitimate greivances at all. My thought was "he didn't really say THAT did he?" This would certainly reflect a shift in US policy toward the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Turns out, he didn't. I don't have time to read in detail right now, but the words "west, bank, and obstacles" do not appear anywhere in the transcript. Neither does that supposed direct quote about Egypt. The word Egypt does not appear. WTF? Safire slipping in a bit of his own adgenda and stamping the President's name on it?? I hope I'm missing something here. I'll have to look at it in detail when I get home from work.

Decius wrote:
]Jeremy wrote:
]] But let me not join the summarizers. Invest a
]] half-hour in reading this moving exposition of the noble
]] goal of American foreign policy.
]
] How about joining the misquoters.

First, allow me to gripe about the Memestreams interface for a moment. I dislike the fact that a reply takes text that I had italicized, indicating it to be an excerpt (perhaps paraphrased) from the document, and attributes it directly to me (as in "Jeremy wrote"). As you can see from by viewing the source, the end-italics markup tag is still present, but the begin-italics tag is gone.

Second, you are too quick to suspect Safire of foul play. To me it seems like a simple misunderstanding. As a New York Times columnist, he provided a pointer to an NYT-hosted copy of FDCH's version of the transcript, which includes a section marked "excerpt missing." This is the section from which the allegedly-phantom quotes are drawn. If you go to the NED web site, you can find the full transcript (as well as a video stream), which includes the missing section and includes the statements that Bush made on the topics in question.

Jeremy wrote:
] First, allow me to gripe about the Memestreams interface for a
] moment. I dislike the fact that a reply takes text that I had
] italicized, indicating it to be an excerpt (perhaps
] paraphrased) from the document, and attributes it directly to
] me (as in "Jeremy wrote").

Its not possible for us to support all possible ways of indicating excerpts. We were using itallics before the website had threads (about a year ago). Then we switched to using the brackets, because there is no way to have multiple levels of itallics. Currently if you select text on a webpage before hitting the bookmarklet you get brackets, and not itallics. If you used that method of quoting text your messages would be re-attributed properly when people replied to them, and furthermore, they'll be converted in the future if we make changes to the way that quotations work.

As it stands now we can't really handle your exerpts because you aren't using the standard method.

] Second, you are too quick to suspect Safire of foul play. To
] me it seems like a simple misunderstanding.

As I said, I did not have time to read the document in detail. I did not see that a section was missing. Thanks for clarifying.

U: Let me also add that Bush's actual comments were quite a bit more qualified then Safire's paraphrase.