I should know to make my blogger rounds before updating my own. Once again, copying from Amelia (I'll just paste the whole entry, since I think Sudiptya might be the only one who actually follows my links...thanks Sid!):

laurel wrote in comments, "it's really hard for most people (me included) to acknowledge that we've been actually fooled. I think we should all say the things we were fooled about/by, and maybe put that together as a website/ad/something. I'll go first.

"I've been duped. I believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I also believed that there were things the Bush administration would not do for reelection."

here's mine: i've been duped. i believed there were weapons of mass destruction in iraq, because the administration seemed so sure, and i couldn't believe they'd lie about something so serious.

i've been duped. i believed in bush's "compassionate conservative" rhetoric. i believed that he really cared about education, and i believed that the "texas miracle" had some sort of basis in reality. but now i know that the houston schools falsified records in order to bear out the "miracle," and i know that texas kids don't show any improvement on any test other than the one they're taught in texas schools. i care about education because i am a student and my parents are teachers, and that makes me mad.

you?


This is harder for me to answer, as I dug my heels in so hard from the outset...I can't really say that I believed the examples above. I don't mean to say that I wasn't duped by this administration, I guess I'm just saying that I was so cynical about it, there were very few things this administration said that I believed. I have been duped by the people surrounding this administration because I believed that "they" would present more obstacles to this administration (example - I did not expect legislation like the Patriot Act or Partial-Birth Abortion ban to actually be passed). I have been duped by the media, time and time again, because I believed that they were still the watchdogs of our society and would reveal when our administration told lies.