Fibber-in-Chief?

Majority in US believes Bush 'stretched truth' about Iraq: poll

That's the headline for an Agence France-Presse story on a University of Maryland survey that found "52 percent of respondents said they believed President George W. Bush and his aides were 'stretching the truth, but not making false statements' about Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear programs."

Which suggests that the issue won't matter much in terms of future elections (even though 10 percent of respondents thought administration officials had presented "evidence they knew was false" to the public and other countries).

Part of this response is doubtless because the Bush people quickly started justifying Gulf War 2 on multiple grounds (including a supposedly desperate need to liberate Iraq), even as the WMD remained the trigger for international action. In any case, the American people seem to be comfortable with a very high level of cognitive dissonance regarding the justification for the invasion of Iraq.

One way to read this sort of response is that it follows from the high levels of public cynicism regarding the government: We've almost come to expect our officials to dissemble to us or be incompetent. In a weird way, bad government actors actually may benefit from such low expectations.