Seattle Post Intelligencer gets Bush claim wrong

This has long been debunked, but they nevertheless repeated the false claim here (emphasis added):

President Bush likes to talk about values. Let’s see him uphold honesty by firing Karl Rove.

That would begin to restore integrity to White House assurances that no senior official had leaked the identity of a CIA agent. Before lowering the ethical bar, Bush promised to fire anyone involved.

Here’s what Bush actually said:

9/30/2003: “And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”

Why do papers like the Seattle PI keep forgetting this? This isn’t the first time the media has forgotten that quote. A few months ago, the media claimed Bush was ‘shifting his policy’ by going from the standpoint of ‘anyone involved will be fired’ to ‘anyone who violated the law will be fired.’ And of course the SPI picks up on that them with the “before lowering the ethical bar” swipe. There wasn’t and has never been a shift in policy on the part of the President regarding this non-issue. But sloppy media reporting leads people to believe otherwise.

The SPI goes on to write:

As a special prosecutor has found, Rove was up to his ears in exposing Valerie Plame Wilson.

Oh? So I guess they are privy to info from the special proesecutor that we are not??

If there was a raspberry award for the media, the SPI would have earned it today.

(Cross-posted at California Conservative)

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