Excellent piece by Michael Kinsley on why George Bush's dishonesty in leading our country into war hasn't resonated with the public, a sizable percentage of which believes that we have discovered WMD's. [link via Roger L. Simon] It's a cynical take, though, and one that I don't necessarily buy. I think that the issue will linger, in much the same way that the public expressed hostility to the efforts to drive Bill Clinton out of office, but nevertheless remembered Monica L. at the ballot box in 2000. When conservatives like George Will, Bill Keller, and William F. Buckley say that the non-discovery of WMD's matters, it matters.

Two other points bear repeating. First, public opinion in America always believes that we are in the right, at least initially. It believed that invading Mexico was justified in 1846 (and almost ended the career of an anti-war congressman named Abraham Lincoln in the process). It believed that the Spanish really blew up the Maine. It believed that the U.S. really was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. For many people, patriotism literally means, my country right or wrong.

Second, it is always important for our elected representatives to tell the truth, especially about matters of policy. Those who say that it doesn't matter that Bush stretched the truth a little to trick us into a war, since Saddam was an evil dictator, have a hard time explaining why we should believe him on that issue, or anything else (ie., Iran). Supporters of the President can't plausibly use the discovery of "mass graves" as a justification for the war, as a point of comparison to the liberation of Auschwitz and Treblinka at the end of World War II, since the U.S. didn't start that war: we were attacked, remember. FDR didn't invent Pearl Harbor.