"IT'S NOT A LIE IF YOU BELIEVE IT"

Jonathan Chait puts the lie to the meme, "Democrats are soft on terror." Chait believes conservatives really, truly BELIEVE it. Well, maybe some do. Others are just outright lying, and they know it.

And the Democrats simply haven't had the platform to disseminate their ideas. They lack control of any branch of government in Washington, so the media ignore their proposals, which have no chance of passing. And they don't have the network of partisan gabbers and propagandists to disseminate their views that conservatives built up when they were out of power. So it's easy for lazy pundits to conclude Democrats simply have no ideas. As "Seinfeld's" George Costanza famously put it: It's not a lie if you believe it.

Yet this belief has had catastrophic consequences. Because conservatives genuinely bought into Bush's view that the only choice was to follow him or coddle the terrorists, they chose to follow him. Thus they have been unwilling to openly question the numerous Bush foreign policy fiascos — from refusing to use U.S. troops to capture Osama bin Laden and his henchmen to failing to plan for the Iraq occupation. If they had raised some questions a couple of years ago, maybe our Middle East policy wouldn't be a shambles. And maybe, come to think of it, their party wouldn't be utterly discredited in the eyes of the public.

Tags: Democrats soft on terror