Attention conservative blogosphere: the White House would like to set the record straight about a little parenthetical in a recent transcript. Late yesterday, you see, the White House posted Obama's recent remarks to the Democratic National Committee, which included this line: "Over the last 15 months we've created over 2.1 million private sector jobs. (Laughter.)."

Conservative bloggers, of course, had a field day. The Drudge Report has been running the excerpt as an above-the-fold headline for much of the day. Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit chose the headline, "Wow. Even DNC Donors Break Out in Laughter When Obama Claims He Created Jobs," adding, "For the record… The country has lost 2.5 million jobs since he moved into the White House. Maybe that's why they were laughing?" Kerry Pickett at The Washington Times was a bit more forgiving, hypothesizing that "those watching the closed captioned text of the speech on television sets saw a laugh cue instead of an applause cue." To be sure, Pickett added, "the president isn't laughing, but Republicans and other critics of his private sector job creation claims sure are."

Mistake or not, the White House moved to correct the record. A little after 4 PM EST, it sent out a "corrected" version of the transcript to the White House press list, striking out "laughter" and replacing it with "applause." Will the bloggers buy it?

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Uri Friedman