Quotations: take care with sources!

As my regular readers (?) might guess, I routinely read "progressive" blogs, including Firedoglake (FDL) and DailyKos.

Today, FDL included the following from the Senate telecom debate:

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama said in a derogatory tone: “The civil libertarians among us would rather defend the constitution than protect our nation’s security.”...

Now, I try to be careful regarding quotations, so I sought corroboration.

DailyKos included this from a diarist, quoting Sessions:

"Some people in this chamber love the Constitution more than the love the safety of this nation."

What did Sen Sessions (R-AL) really say?

As noted above, I try to be careful with quotations, seeking corroboration whenever possible, and relying on what I regard as best authorities when corroboration isn't possible. Having two similar but distinctly different versions of this quotation is bothersome.

To resolve the discrepancy, I retreated to the Congressional Record, where I found this:

Mr. SESSIONS: ... I would point out to my colleagues that we have made two dramatic errors some years ago in a situation just like this, on emotion driven by our civil libertarian friends, such that a wall was put up between the FBI and the CIA which barred the sharing of information between those two critical agencies.
...
But, oh no, the others loved the Constitution more, they loved liberty more, so these unwise laws were passed. And what happened afterwards, after 9/11? Well, we properly removed
both of those silly rules. We have taken them off the books, in a bipartisan, unanimous way. They were never required by the Constitution. They were never sensible from the beginning. But we passed them on emotion not reason. Some ideas being promoted now are not sensible either and can leave our country in dangerous straits. So this is an important matter. These things are life and death issues.[Congressional Record, 17 Dec 2007, S15724]

This is considerably less inflammatory than either of the two versions of the quotation cited above.

I skimmed the entire 58 pages of the Congressional Record devoted to the telecom-immunity debate - using the very primitive page-by-page interface provided, and the Adobe Reader search function (one page at a time!) - and this was the ONLY statement by Sen Sessions that corresponded to the "quotations" provided in the blogs!

In most of my posts I attempt to provide a link to the source of a quotation, or indicate explicitly that it is a "remembered" or "paraphrased" quotation. It'd be nice if others were as scrupulous.

W and his minions are sufficiently evil. We don't need to misquote 'em!