With Eliot Spitzer gone, Chuck Schumer moves to the head of the list of smugly self-righteous New York pols. So it was particularly satisfying to see Sen. Jon Kyl [R-AZ] put Schumer is his place on This Week with George Stephanopoulos today.

A guest with Kyl for purposes of discussing the economy, Schumer clearly came in with a game plan: to analogize President Bush to the man who presided over the beginning of the Great Depression: Herbert Hoover. After Schumer tried it twice, Kyl had had enough and unleashed a riposte as devastating as it was reasoned.

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: