I admit to being confused by the Bushies' latest tactic, which is to justify the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that many "on the other side" believed the same thing. Yeah, I think we already knew that a lot of Democrats were just as cravenly idiotic on the subject as the President, and it helps to remember that in the run-up to all wars, including the aforementioned adventure, hawkishness has historically been a safe fall-back. In the almost 230 years of our national existence, no politician running for high office in America has ever lost his seat because he was too hawkish.

But it ignores the more fundamental problem: Bush is the President of the United States. He can't use, as justification for his policies, the fact that other people were also conned. He's not only supposed to be a leader; he occupies a unique position, a perch from which the nation expects to follow his lead. Americans typically don't like to assume that their President might be telling the truth, depending on his whims. On an issue like whether to send our young off to battle, we need to have that confidence, especially coming from a President who avoided military service in his youth, and who has kept his daughters out of harm's way in theirs'.

Thus, it leaves a rather stale taste in our mouths when the President tries to argue that he didn't really lie in this instance, since the other side believed the same things. He was the one getting intelligence briefings telling him that Saddam's WMD capacity was vastly overstated, that stories of Iraq's role in 9/11 and its efforts to purchase yellowcake from Niger were false, that the cost, in both blood and money, in rebuilding and stabilizing Iraq was going to grow at a geometrical scale. The kindest interpretation of that is to say that Bush ignored the intelligence he didn't want to hear; the less kind interpretation is that he out-and-out lied. In either case, he and his advisors, almost all of whom to a man had avoided serving in Vietnam even though they also supported that adventure, treated the spectre of war too casually, and that shame cannot be palmed off on the Democrats.