Navel Gazing

This post over at TPMCafe just strikes me as somewhat odd. As in, how can so many people have the same case of Amnesia about who said what when about war in Iraq?

Meanwhile, even though it seems the media (and those who write about them) might have forgotten, others have not:

Assertion doesn't always beat facts, but it happens a lot. For example, many of President Bush's detractors are saying that his argument for keeping troops in Iraq -- to achieve a democratic transformation -- is a new rationale meant to distract from the missing WMDs. The New York Times made that charge in an editorial on April 27. But it isn't true. Bush listed democratic transformation in Iraq as one of his aims before the war, as the Times acknowledged in an editorial on Feb. 27, 2003. Distilling the president's various arguments on Iraq down to the one on which a lot of people think they were snookered -- the WMDs -- is a distortion, but it accurately expresses a popular feeling, so who cares if it isn't so? Not the Times, apparently.

The emphasis is mine (access the Times editorial at the archives here). I find ideas about a media "skew towards Bush," to be downright laughable. But regardless, reporting about the Administration's case for war mirrored much of the general thought about Iraq--namely, that there were reasons to go after Sadaam. Foreign governments believed it, enough at the CIA believed it and of course the decision-makers at the cabinet-level believed it.

They didn't believe it on the strength of media's reporting...they believed it for the same reason that media reported it: most of the evidence pointed there.