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There's a problem with the word "responsibility" these days. It certainly doesn't seem to mean what it used to mean.
Al Gonzales claims to be "responsible" for what happens in the Justice Department, but follows this up with evasions and laying the blame at others' feet. He says he's responsible, but then shifts the consequences to everyone else - which doesn't seem very "responsible" to me.
In this case, yeah, people who voted for Bush are "responsible" for putting him in office. But at the same time, who could have reasonably guessed that all of the crap from the intervening years was going to happen? The passage of the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, etc. would have been virtually unthinkable without being preceeded by 9/11 - and that itself was unthinkable up until 9/10 (at least to laypeople - voters).
So, what would it mean if I claimed to accept responsibility for voting for G. W. Bush in 2000? Would that equate to responsibility for things that happened later which were in no way forseeable? From the point of view I had in 2000, I couldn't have told you whether Al Gore was more likely than Bush to do all the things we've seen in the last 6 years - because I couldn't have imagined them happening at all. Does this make me unreasonably naive?
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Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam
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