Update on the 'see' vs 'seek' change in the White House transcripts

Josh Marshall has the scoop on the altered transcript of Bush's speech to the Australian Parliament. As noted previously, when giving the speech, he said that "We see a China.....", but after the statement was widely questions (because it just didn't really make any sense), the copy of the speech at the White House website was changed to read "We seek a China...."

According to one of Josh's sources, the President actually was supposed to say "seek", but screwed it up, and used the wrong word. Marshall notes that, oddly, when the flap over the statement first arose, the White House tried to defend the statement. At some point, though, they apparently figured out that Bush had read the speech wrong, and rather than just issue a statement saying Bush had inadvertently misspoken, they said nothing, and just changed the White House version of the transcript to read what he was supposed to have said, as opposed to what he actually did say.

I just really don't "get" this administration sometimes. What would have been the harm of issuing a statement simply acknowledging that the President misspoke? If they wanted the official transcript to reflect what he was supposed to have said rather than what he did say, they could simply have put an asterisk after the word "see" in the transcript with a footnote saying that the word should have been "seek". As it stands, there are now two "official" records of the speech, one on the White House website showing what the President was supposed to have said, and one in the official record of Australia's parliament showing what he actually did did say.

[Note: The above link goes to the official Australian record at their website. White I doubt that will be modified the way the White House record was, I've gone ahead and saved a copy anway, which can be found here. In either case, to see the sentence in question, go to page 10 of the document, and it's about 1/3 of the way down the first column.]

At any rate, in the overall scheme of things this may not be as bad of a "revision" as some of the others we've seen from this administration, but at the core, it's still just another example of how the White House can't tolerate being seen as having made an error, even one as simple as inadvertantly using the wrong word in a speech.