Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[goodluck]

All I meant was that when Dean wrote, "To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked," he is wrong. Americans have been taken into war on "bogus information" many times in the past. The numerous Indian wars, the "splendid little war" of 1898 and its aftermath in the Phillipines, WWI, Vietnam, Gulf War I, many "little" wars in Central and South America throughout the 20th century (most of which didn't make much actual use of US soldiers, but were nevertheless at least in part inspired and supported by the US govt and used in various ways military "advisors")--even if one or two of these may have been actually justified for other reasons, there were bogus reasons given, there were numerous lies told both to justify and to motivate the action--and in some cases these lies are still mindlessly repeated as fact, no matter how many historians have exposed them as idiocy, lunacy, or just plain venal.

Lies don't matter to many if not most Americans as long as a good cover story can be cooked up and repeated, or as long as the lie is "clever" enough and "works" well enough to appear to advance US interests (e.g., Iran-Contra).