I'm not up for hunting for the thread, but I recall that you'd made a snarky comment to the effect that Democrats had "erased the issue [of the deceptions used to start the Iraq war] from their hard drives", and I offered an alternative and less sinister (thus more reasonable) explanation. Perhaps I was projecting my own desire to look ahead to January 20, 2009, and to try to avoid being trapped in the past, reinforced by similar opinions here and there. As I said, now I feel like a bit of a sucker for the feeling of tentative goodwill.

For all the noise and fury intended to obscure the basic issues, you're getting nowhere trying to exonerate Bush and his minions by tarring everybody you can think of. It doesn't matter what Democrats repeated, it matters that the false statements were first broadcast by high officials of the Bush Administration. And while having a database of false statements puts recollection on a more systematic basis, I don't have any trouble remembering them. I watched Colin Powell's dog-and-pony show at the UN with incredulity, calling "bullshit" every 30 seconds or so, as he insulted my intelligence with things like the overhead image of a generic tractor-trailer rig and insisting that it "clearly" showed a chemical weapons transporter. Or the disconnected phrases from radio intercepts that were so ambiguous they were simply a Rorschach Test for warmongers.

It's possible that all these warmongers had deceived themselves in their desire to go to war, stiffened their own resolve through self-deception before they made their pitch to the American people. But there's absolutely no question that there was a staggering amount of deception involved in bullying America into war. Whether the Bushies were conscious or unconscious of the deception, there's no question that they deceived everybody else. Even Republicans must be held accountable for their actions.