Bushism of the Day:

Slate‘s Bushism of the Day for today is:

“Listen, the other day I was asked about the National Intelligence Estimate, which is a National Intelligence Estimate.” — Washington, D.C., Sep. 23, 2004

Ha ha ha. That President of ours, he’s such a doofus. Why would he say “about the National Intelligence Estimate, which is a National Intelligence Estimate”? Hard to believe, but there it is. Or, wait a minute, maybe because it’s hard to believe, we should double-check before believing it, no? That is, unless we’re so wedded to the “Bush Talks Funny” meme that we’ve relaxed our normal skepticism and journalistic caution.

Fortunately, reader Jacob Kaufman’s skepticism and caution hadn’t relaxed, so he found the White House transcript (remember, Slate‘s Bushism of the Day column never includes pointers to the transcripts). That site happens to have the audio. And the audio, at a little after 30:54, shows that Bush said:

Listen, the other day I was asked about the NIE, which is a National Intelligence Estimate.

Yup, that’s right. President Bush used the abbreviation, and then explained what the abbreviation meant. The official transcript erroneously spelled out the abbreviation, though it rendered it in all caps, which — together with the improbability of the President’s just saying “the National Intelligence Estimate, which is the National Intelligence Estimate” — might have led a cautious journalist to check into it:

Listen, the other day I was asked about the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE, which is a National Intelligence Estimate.

A cautious journalist might also have checked what other sources say. A quick LEXIS search for “Listen, the other day I was asked about the” revealed 10 references, of which 8 contained the term “NIE,” and 2 contained “NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE” (again, in all caps). But apparently the author of the Bushisms column didn’t do this check; if he had, then maybe he would have realized that he should try to find the audio, which would have settled the matter.

As I’ve said before, part of the problem with the Bushisms column is that they often fault the President for things that aren’t much worth faulting. But the broader problem is that once a journalist gets into the mindset of “Let me catch Bush misspeaking,” it’s very easy to start seeing errors where no errors exist. Instead of the normal “Someone says Bush erred, so let’s investigate this skeptically” view that journalists should have, the author falls into the habit of assuming that all claimed Bush misstatements are in fact misstatements. And the consequence is screw-ups like this. Shouldn’t we expect better from the editor of a leading magazine?

UPDATE: The item is now gone from the Slate table of contents, and its text has been blanked out on the original page; it’s to Slate‘s credit that they so promptly removed the error. I assume Slate will also post another item explicitly acknowledging the error, so that people who read and understandably believed the original item could learn that they’d been misinformed.

It seems to me that this should go both in Slate‘s Corrections column and as a separate Bushism of the Day item: I take it that many readers who read Bushisms don’t regularly look at the Corrections, but will look at the next Bushisms entry. In any event, I take it that Slate will indeed publish an official correction.