Bloggers have caught a politician saying one thing in a speech, while carrying a very different rendering of a critical passage at a supposed “transcript” of that speech.

The difference is significant.

The transcript whitewashes a slander on the performance of US troops in Iraq delivered by a United States senator.

Specifically, New York’s Charles Schumer gave a made a speech on the floor of the Senate last week ascribing the turnaround in the Anbar province in Iraq to the locals, and discrediting the notion that American troops could have had anything to do with it.

Here is the relevant portion of Armchair General Schumer’s speech you will hear at the YouTube video:

And let me be clear. The violence in Anbar has gone down in spite of the Surge, not because of the Surge.

The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from Al Qaeda said to these tribes, “We have to fight Al Qaeda ourselves.”

However, that section of the “transcript” of Schumer’s speech posted at his Senate web site (a backup screen cap, in case the transcript gets revised at a future date, is here) reads thusly:

And let me be clear: the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge.

The lack of protection for these tribes from al Qaeda made it clear to these tribes, “We have to fight al Qaeda ourselves.”

Sweetness & Light appears to have been the first to catch the discrepancy. Allah at Hot Air and Mark at Weapons of Mass Discussion, where I first learned of it, have also weighed in on this.

S&L’s take:

Mr. Schumer will say anything to try to bring about America’s defeat in Iraq and in the war on terror in general. For the Senator is also a traitor.

But, it turns out, Chuck Schumer is not only a liar and a traitor, he is a coward as well.

Four days after Schumer’s speech, it’s very clear that Old Media could care less about the senator’s speech, never mind the “transcript” sleight-of-hand:

• A New York Times search on “Schumer” (may require free registration) shows that the “All the News That’s Fit to Print” paper didn’t even cover the speech by the Empire State’s senior senator.
• A Washington Post search on “Schumer Iraq” (not in quotes; requires free registration) also has no coverage.
• A Google News search on “Schumer Iraq” (not in quotes) has articles about Schumer’s speech at places like Investors Business Daily, and Men’s News Daily. Neither report noted the transcript disparity. More important, the search results show that the speech itself, let alone the “transcript” disparity, were of no interest to the wire services or Old Media outlets.

Many New York voters would certainly take umbrage at Schumer’s characterization of our troops as “unable” — if they knew.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE: How far is the mental distance from apparently playing with site traffic counts to changing the transcript of a speech to remove a damning passage in the name of self-protection? I would suggest that the answer is “not as far as you might think.”

The Daily Bellwether’s Bill Sloat put on the hazmat suit and the super heavy-duty goggles, and made a journey over to Buckeye State Blog, where a previously unknown internal controversy boiled over at this September 7 post over this August 2006 post:

Doing the math, BSB’s Sitemeter report covered the past 150 days (1,045,225/6,969) preceding the post.

Sloat further found that the then-proprietor of BSB claimed to have had 3 million page views (that BSB comment is here; memo to Bill — Hyperlinks are your friends), or over 20,000 page views per day, presumably during that same 150-day period.

Your truly has an externally-sourced reason to doubt the 1,000,000 and 3,000,000 claims (click on the pic to open it in a separate window):

The above compares visitor traffic at BizzyBlog vs. BSB during the past two years; I changed the URL of Alexa’s canned 3-year result to 2 years and added a few graphical thingies to come up with what you see. Someone more expert than me might be able to make other modifications that will support the points I’m about to make with better visibility.

The red vertical lines represent the beginning and end of the 150-day period involved, as do the two ends of the double arrow. The maroonish line on the graph represents BizzyBlog; the blue line is BSB.

It’s more obvious on the big JPEG you’ll find here, but even the small view makes it pretty clear that BizzyBlog’s visitor traffic exceeded BSB’s during the period involved.

Yours truly happens to have a cockeyed counter (not visible to readers) that, in addition to real hits from real people, also records robotic hits, which come from search engines, advertisers, spammers and others who don’t have a real person sitting in front of a computer at the other end. The robots inflates the statistics I see by a factor of 2 or 3. I can tell you with certainty that although there may have been one or two days with over 7,000 visitors, BizzyBlog did NOT average 6,969 visitors per day during the period in question, even WITH the robots. The unfortunate reality is that my real human visitor traffic during that time period was no more than 10%-15% of what BSB is claiming.

As to page views, gluttons for visual punishment can look at this graph (BizzyBlog is blue, and BSB is maroonish at this graph). If you do, you’ll see that BizzyBlog and BSB are much closer in page views. This makes sense because of BSB’s multiple authors and forum-like design. Even at that, BizzyBlog (the blue one) still appears to edge out BSB. I am absolutely certain that I did not have a single day with 20,000 non-robotic page views, never mind averaging that number during the entire 150-day period (in, my, dreams).

As I understand it, Sitemeter, the counter BSB was using at the time, is, pre-programmed to exclude robotic hits. I don’t know if it can be done, but even if BSB were able to change Sitemeter’s parameters, based on my experience and what Alexa is telling us, I don’t see how BSB, even with robots, gets to almost 7,000 daily visitors or 20,000 daily page views during the time period involved.

I’ll leave the explanation of all of this to BSB’s current and former leaders. In the meantime, my assessment of the matter is a bit stronger than Bill Sloat’s, which is that “the episode — from what is known so far — appears distressing at least, dishonest at most.” Though of course we’ll never know, it sure would nice to know how much of BSB’s more recent growth was built on a foundation of what appear to be serious misrepresentations about its early- and mid-2006 popularity.

The folks at BSB have had plenty of less-than stellar exemplars at higher levels. Just one of them is here at tonight’s post.

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UPDATE: I am told that Alexa’s accuracy is open to debate. Here is what the Wiki entry says (Wiki links and footnotes omitted) –

There is some controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior. If Alexa’s user base is a fair statistical sample of the internet user population (e.g., a random sample of sufficient size), Alexa’s ranking should be quite accurate. In reality, not much is known about the sample and possible sampling biases. Alexa itself notes several examples. A known source of bias is the self-selecting, opt-in nature of Alexa traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of this bias on rankings is not reported.

Another concern is whether Alexa ratings are easily manipulated. Some webmasters claim that they can significantly improve the Alexa ranking of less popular sites by making them the default page, by exchanging web traffic with other webmasters, and by requiring their users to install the Alexa toolbar; however, such claims are often anecdotal and are offered without statistics or other evidence.

I am not remotely expert in these matters. It’s nevertheless hard to see how the above could explain a site graphing obviously lower than another one in visitors at Alexa — yet somehow generating 7-10 times as much visitor traffic over a five-month period.

It occurred in Maine:

Published: Monday, September 03

Montreal police Constable Giovanni Di Legge was on holidays with his family in Maine at the time but when he heard the cries for help, he didn’t think twice.

The 15-year veteran of the force dove into the frigid waters at Wells Beach, just north of Ogunquit, Me., to save an American woman, who along with three others, was caught in a powerful riptide.

“I got pulled under, opened my eyes and it was so murky,” said Kristen McCarthy, a 31-year-old nursing student from Marlborough, Mass.

“It was surreal,” she said as she recalled the events of Aug. 24, the day Di Legge saved her life.

“I came up and saw a beautiful blue sky - but I knew If I got pulled down again, I was dead.”

“I was exhausted at that point.”

Go here for the rest of the story.