OK, let's look at Iraq when we didn't find WMD's. It had no impact on our policy, and the president and the war supporters both said the war was justified regardless.
In other words, the *enormous* accountability people thought existed when the assurances were given, when it seemed it would a a *huge* Watergate-level deal if not larger should there not be WMD, turned out to be a minor political event, with the president re-elected soon after the lack of WMD was determined. There *should* be more accountability.
I think there are a lot of people who follow that without realizing it. They think they're 'fair', but somehow always end up excusing one side.
There were no shortage of people here in P&N who said sincerely that if no WMD were found they'd eat their hats, figuratively, and almost to a person, that changed.
You're displaying the very behavior here I'm talking about- rather than say you don't know how much of a role the election played, you pick a minimal role favorable to Israel and say you believe that's the role it played. You are spinning for them, and I don't think you even reaalize it.
I've discussed elsewhere the whole 'unlimited license for violence' issue the other justitifcations you raise involve so I'll leave that point out.
Don't miss the larger point I was making about how bias works by getting caught up in the specific example about the role of elections here.
The larger issue was not whether the example is correct, but how the supporters of that side would react in many cases if it were.
It's funny, back when the USSR fell, I suspected that our foreign policy rhetoric would shift to the 'terrorist', as our major state enemy was gone; suddenly all those attacks on what evil government can do could hit a tlittle too close to home, and it was time to demonize our most likely new enemies as we went around making some new enemies. We could hardly affor for our public to be making comparisons to abused people and our founding fathers; we needed to have the stereotypical 'terrorist' ready to label anyone with, and people conditioned to oppose anyone with that label. I think that's largely what happened. Of course, when it was the Afghan radical Islamicists we wer earmining fighting the USSR, the word terrorist did not apply, it was all about freedom fighters.
