Suspending disbelief - "Bush lied"

One of the things that has continued to fascinate me is the far left's doggedly sticking to the "Bush lied" silliness even though it has repeatedly been proven false by bipartisan reports here and by other governments, and even though it is completely illogical. I've never quite understood the strategy there. The speaker must either be ignorant of the Senate Intelligence Report and the like, or simply be lying to try to fool the ignorant. He must believe the listener is completely misinformed and incapable of walking through the basic logical implications of the matter. When you read or hear some form of the "Bush lied" argument (using that term loosely) you always expect the speaker to wink or the writer to throw in a smiley, but they usually pretend that they're serious. It's a modern Flat Earth argument.

One gaping hole in the logic, repeated ad nauseum, is that the President in lying us into war would have done so fully knowing that it would be shown to be false once we got in there and combed through the country. In short, he would be purposefully making himself look bad. This doesn't even pass the laugh test, but I suppose if you're targeting the stupid you're hoping they won't get the joke.

Another required leap of logic in this argument is supplied by Peggy Noonan:

"[T]here seems to me a thing that is blindingly obvious, and yet I've never seen it remarked upon. It is that an administration that would coldly lie us into Iraq is an administration that would lie about what was found there. And yet the soldiers, searchers and investigators who looked high and low throughout Iraq made it clear they had found nothing, an outcome the administration did not dispute and came to admit. But an administration that would lie about reasons would lie about results, wouldn't it? Or try to? Yet they were candid."

Indeed. I'm really interested to see how this works out for Democrats in the 2006 midterms. Maybe the traditional exit-polling by sex, income, education and the like can give us a breakdown of the clueless vote. It's certainly a target demographic.