Um, I understand why Secretary of State John Kerry felt he had to include this caveat early in his speech today on Syria, but when you're forced to come out of the gate promising that you're not lying about weapons of mass destruction the way the previous administration did, you're not exactly arguing from a strong position:

Our intelligence community has carefully reviewed and re-reviewed information regarding this attack. And I will tell you it has done so more than mindful of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment. Accordingly, we have taken unprecedented steps to declassify and make facts available to people who can judge for themselves.

And that, my fellow patriots, is perhaps President George W. Bush's greatest and most beneficial legacy: Instilling in the American psyche a deeply ingrained skepticism of both the motives and competence of our intelligence community. If we don't intervene militarily in Syria in the wake of these alleged chemical weapons attacks—or if our military engagement is uncharacteristically restrained—it will partially be due to the skepticism of an American public that has learned to mistrust its own government, and that simply does not believe that it has any idea of what is actually transpiring on the ground.

So thank you, President Bush, for helping to keep future administrations out of war.