Think Transgress: Pro-Clinton Blog Retracts McCain Smear

Mark Hemingway at the Corner pointed at this one: As Hillary's Army publishes paperbacks complaining about the "Free Ride" John McCain is getting from the press, the Hillary brigade at Think Progress didn't give McCain a free ride, they gave him an inaccurate smearing. They claimed that Sen. McCain's conservative-indigestion-causing speech on foreign affairs plagiarized phrases from an Admiral Timothy Ziemer. Oops, they report today, we had it backwards:

UPDATE: It appears that Ziemer’s speech may have been plagiarized from McCain. According to the McCain campaign, the senator used these lines before Ziemer — in 1995. We regret the error.

UPDATE: As a blog that strives to maintain credibility and transparency, we would like to explain our mistake. When we were alerted to the tip that Adm. Ziemer gave a similar speech in 1996, we searched LexisNexis and McCain’s campaign site for whether the senator used the disputed phrases before that time. We did not find anything. After we published the post, the McCain campaign contacted us and pointed to a speech given by the senator in 1995, which appears on McCain’s Senate site. As soon as we were alerted to the error, we rushed to publish a correction. Once again, we regret the error.

The smear was filed under their topic heading "Corrupt Establishment." Isn't it always giggle-inducing when a pro-Hillary blog claims to expose a "Corrupt Establishment"? Tom Maguire at Just One Minute offered more:

Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but how much prescience would have been required for Think Progress to have pinned this down?  For example, one of the McCain phrases that stood out was "War is wretched beyond description."  A search on the word "wretched" at McCain's Senate site produces just three hits, one of which is the 1995 speech.

What seems to have confounded the person who noticed this is that Google's search spiders seem to be blocked from the McCain site; neither a conventional Google search nor a Google search on McCain's Senate site deliver the 1995 speech.