Pants on Fire

Another lacuna from the Brownstein article. He writes:

That dynamic was especially pronounced in 2000 and 2004, when the country was divided almost exactly in half between Bush and his Democratic opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry. The brutal tone and tenor of each of those campaigns—the Swift Boat accusations on one side, or the charges that Bush had knowingly lied to push America into war with Iraq on the other—left many (possibly most) Gore and Kerry supporters utterly disdainful of Bush, and vice versa.

I’ve long wondered why, exactly, the charge that Bush knowingly misled people in order to garner public support for the Iraq War is considered such an incendiary charge. Is it because politicians have a reputation as generally honest people who would never fib? Well, that can’t be right. Is it because Bush is considered an unusually honest politician who, unlike the rest of the breed, is a straight-talker? Well, no, that’s not right either. If anything, the main problem with the “Bush lied, thousands died” critique is the reverse; not that it’s unusually outrageous (the way the Swift Vets were) but that it’s extremely banal. Politicians say and do misleading things all the time and the fact that some particular policy initiative was sold, in part, through dishonest methods hardly invalidates it.