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ace:
first off it is beyond ironic that you claim that you would not rely on cherry-picked information in the purchase of a car, but you seem to have relied on it when you decided to support the bush administration and its lurid little colonial adventure in iraq. but wait--you are inclined to trust the administration and so you assume their information is in general truthful--but you are not inclined to trust the car dealer because, well, "car dealer" is just a name in a sentence which does not and cannot refer to anyone in particular.
the answer seems to me obvious--in the run-up to the iraq debacle,congress--republican controlled congress--was presented with manufactured evidence, tendentiously constructed evidence, false evidence from an administration which the then-majority supported politically and which the then-majority was inclined to trust. in 2003 conservatives, like their proxies in the then-majority in congress, were inclined to trust the administration.
there are no objective rules that can obviate the fundamental role played in even the most tightly regulated administrative apparatus by trust, by personal relationships and the expectations built across them.
you seem to want the iraq mess to devolve into mush now because it suits your political purposes to dissolve it into mush.
but you know full well that congress reviewed "evidence" presented them by the administration. you know full well that while a thorough review was possible, it did not happen, and that a good explanation for why it did not happen is the trust the then-majority had in the good faith of the administration--it is just like, say, academic articles--it is always possible that one's footnotes could be wrong or made up--but generally, no-one checks. why? the name of the author is functionally a guarantee against such problems.
why? because of the assumptions about the nature and integrity of review processes in refereed journals--but the broader social context of academic work in general informs this assumption. here too, one;s relation to evidence is fundamentally rooted in one's assumptions about the writer or speaker.
and when it turns out that the rules have been violated, the fault lay with the writer or speaker. the writer is the person responsible for the selection and ordering of information--if the information is fucked up, it is the writer's fault--BEFORE it is the fault of the readers who believed the article was true.
but this is self-evident, ace.
i really do not see what your arguments are geared toward accomplishing.
was congress remiss in accepting the administration's case? yes. whose fault is that? the administration's first and foremost, because they put forward the false evidence and then relied on (an abuse of) trust/credibility.
is congress responsible for the iraq debacle? in part yes--but congress is not responsible for being lied to by the administration.
but you already know all this, ace.
i think you are being disengenous.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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