How did the Bush administration get fooled by poor intelligence and the babbling of some Iraqi expats? There were serious voices out there casting doubt on the narrative, but they were swept aside.....because Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to believe.
Pretty soon that belief became their truth and the virus spread to their staff, congress and the media. Surely the CIA couldn’t get it that wrong.
Fast forward to 2017 and a man elected to office that the establishment thought wasn’t worthy. In his retinue there were a few staff members who had worked as lobbyists for dubious countries.....a claimed Trump interest in Russian property ....and a few random meetings with Russians.
That was enough. Pretty soon the narrative emerged among Dems, the FBI, the Justice Department and the media that Trump was a Russian asset. Madness but the virus was at work. Sensible people bought into this Hoax.
And here I disagree with the Conservative voices.....they didn’t know it was a hoax, Rosentein and all the white collar spies at the FBI would never have consciously put themselves in the position of being caught out in a WMD moment if they knew it wasn’t true.
They thought they were going to find enough to cloud the whole issue and make it stick. But they were wrong. There was literally nothing there. In the process the reputations of the Justice Department and the FBI have been badly damaged. And the competence of US intelligence has been badly exposed for the second time in 20 years.
It’s a disastrous moment and testament to the power of mass delusion over individual independent thought.