This is mystifying on many levels: so… and stick with me for a second here… Bush makes a speech earlier in the month about how Castro’s government encourages prostitution. And Castro makes a fiery speech denying the charges and denouncing Bush. The MSNBC article about the flap reports all this and analyzes Castro’s attack on Bush’s mental health and whether Bush’s Cuba policy is slanted to activate the Republican base in Florida.

But… here’s the kicker… the MSNBC article devotes precisely one brief paragraph to the most bizarre and howlingly embarrassing detail of the whole incident:

Three days after Bush’s remarks, the Los Angeles Times reported that the White House found the comments in a Dartmouth undergraduate paper posted on the Internet and lifted them out of context. “It shows they didn’t read much of the article,” commented Charlie Trumbull, the author.

Did you get that?! Bush’s speechwriters plagarized an undergraduate essay that they lifted from the Internet and that they apparently didn’t even bother to fully read. And MSNBC devotes a paragraph to it.

Fortunately, the LA Times did cover the real story. The White House response?

On Monday, administration officials acknowledged that they did not have a source for the wording of the president’s citation other than Trumbull’s paper. A White House spokeswoman defended the inclusion, arguing it expressed an essential truth about Cuba.

Well, there you go. As long as something expresses an essential truth, it really doesn’t matter if the source is factual or accurate. Aren’t they the least bit embarrassed? I mean, they’re the White House, for godssake. Don’t they have access to actual information?

Maybe it’s hard. You know? Maybe, when you’ve been caught in as many embarrassing lies and distortions as this administration has, maybe it’s just hard to be embarrassed anymore. It’s like when you’re so behind with cleaning your house that you start accepting the mess as a virtue. You just pile more crap anywhere and say, “it’s my house and I can live however I want.”

Aaaaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

That is all.

(via Boing Boing)

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Wednesday, July 28th, 2004 @ 11:36 am Politics Matters, Truth Matters
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