It gets worse for Obama’s defenders, though, than merely being demonstrably wrong. It turns out that while they were insisting that the Bush administration consistently refused to reference “Jerusalem, Israel,” the Obama State Department was busy scrubbing documents in which Bush administration referenced “Jerusalem, Israel.” Straight down the memory hole. That’s kind of amazing when you pause and think about it, no?

The “Jerusalem, Israel” captions and statements from the Bush-era White House are digitally archived and frozen, and so beyond the administration’s reach. But Bush-era State Department reports are stored on the Obama State Department’s servers. Two old documents in particular – the State Department’s FY 2002 and FY 2003 Performance and Accountability Reports – come up quickly in searches. When they were originally written they both had appendices identifying the location of the Jerusalem consulate as “Jerusalem, Israel.” Some time in the last two weeks that location was changed to “Jerusalem.” Whoever made the changes even went back and scrubbed the old “hard copy” PDFs. You can do the compare and contrast yourself. Click on these links for scrubbed versions of FY 2002 HTML(http://www.state.gov/s/d/rm/rls/perfrpt/2002/html/19200.htm), FY 2003 HTML(http://www.state.gov/s/d/rm/rls/perfrpt/2003/html/29446.htm), FY 2002 PDF, FY 2003 PDF, and on these links for cached original versions of FY 2002 HTML(http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.state.gov%2Fs%2Fd%2Frm%2Frls%2Fperfrpt%2F2002%2Fhtml%2F19200.htm), FY 2003 HTML(http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.state.gov%2Fs%2Fd%2Frm%2Frls%2Fperfrpt%2F2003%2Fhtml%2F29446.htm), FY 2002 PDF, FY 2003 PDF.