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[Gattigap]

Originally posted by bilmore
Does no one actually read what he said? Is everyone satisfied to make do with the snips?

He didn't say "IF he wins, THEN we'll get hit."

He said "IF he wins, and we get hit again (and we will), THEN Kerry will treat this as a police matter, and we're screwed because of that."

And Gore didn't say he "invented the Internet," he said that he helped get funding to the projects in DoD that led to it.

What Cheney precisely said was:

Cheney, in Des Moines on Tuesday, delivered the campaign's message that the United States would be safer in Bush's hands with cutting-torch directness, saying, "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, that we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again."

He continued, "That we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we're not really at war."

Though this is what people attending the event heard, and what by all accounts Cheney wanted to say, the weak-kneed pussies at BC'04 felt compelled to change the transcript.

In a change that highlighted the sensitivity of Cheney's statement, the White House yesterday released a revised version of the transcript of his remarks. The official transcript, posted on the White House Web site Tuesday afternoon and e-mailed to reporters, said: "(I)t's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again."

In a version released Tuesday to reporters traveling with Cheney, however, the period at the end of "hit again" was removed and replaced with a comma, which linked his blunter statement to his standard stump language expressing concern that future attacks would be treated as "just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war."

Of this post hoc wordsmithing, even Clinton would be proud.