If at first you don't succeed, alter the transcript

You'd think that a White House suffering from a severe crisis of confidence due to corruption, would start to get the hint that, hey, maybe being deceitful isn't so good.

Not our boys, though. Check it out: White House Alters Transcript of Press Briefing.

The gist is that during Scott McClellan's news conference on October 31, NBC's David Gregory asked this question:

Q. Whether there’s a question of legality, we know for a fact that there was involvement. We know that Karl Rove, based on what he and his lawyer have said, did have a conversation about somebody who Patrick Fitzgerald said was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. We know that Scooter Libby also had conversations.

News outlets from Congressional Quarterly to Fox News Service transcribed McClellan's resonse as: "That's accurate."

Not the White House, though. They transcribed the answer as "I don't think that's accurate."

Excuse me? That's a pretty big difference.

You can listen and make your own judgment by clicking here. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, er, three times, er, four times, er...how many times have the Bushies pulled a stunt like that? Either way, I think they'll find it harder and harder to fool people when absolutely nobody trusts you, not even to post a simple transcript to the web.