Dear Shankar Vedantam:
I am sure you'll be unsurprised to learn that some people question your motives for writing this piece.
If you had limited yourself to examining what people think of other ordinary people's motivations, that would have been a good article. But to imply, as you do, that one cannot form a valid opinion about the Bush administration's motive after six years of scandal goes beyond simple observation. The thing you elide is that there is evidence in the form of news reporting about the Bush administration that might cause people to hold certain attitudes about Bush, while that is not true (or certainly not nearly as true) about his followers. At best, you should have said that people's beliefs about each other are congruent with their beliefs about Bush.
The impression you leave is the frustrating "on one hand, on the other hand, who's to say what the truth is" cop-out that marked so much of the journalism around the Iraq war - including that of the Post.
-Mithras Invicti
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