People who don't learn from their history are bound to repeat it.

On August 7, 1964,  after an alleged incident with a North Vietnam gun boat  the Congress of the United States passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution:

The resolution gave President Lyndon Johnson broad powers in dealing with North Vietnam, including sending U.S. troops.  News coverage relied almost entirely on official U.S. government sources so Americans assumed the North had launched an unprovoked attack. Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK), provided the only "no" votes. (peacebutton.info)

The incident never occurred. The President lied to the people of the United States. *

What concerns me is the liberal's capacity to forget the lessons of history.  People continue to experience shock and outrage that Bush lied about Iraq's nuclear weapon's program.  The Weapon of Mass Destruction rationale was a hoax, and that hoax was exposed by the weapon's inspectors before the invasion - Bush, Rice and Powell's lies were demolished by solid evidence by scores of independent sources.  It seems to me that if one is outraged now that may indicate that you refused to look at the evidence before the invasion.

But what concerns me is that after the liberal becomes outraged, "we were lied to",  they go in search of a Democrat that will replace him.  Lying to the citizenry is a characteristic of the entire political culture.  We must go beyond consumer politics, we must stop enabling a process by which "we chose" a pre selected candidate who tells us the lies we want to hear during his (or her) campaign.  To learn from history is to demand accountability,  to engage critically and assume that they are lying until they prove to you that they care about truth.

The Tonkin Gulf resolution was passed by Congress 42 years ago, the United States sent teen agers into Vietnam and they came back in body bags.  I knew too many of those soldiers to forgive and forget.  They were misused by a corrupt political process.  If we would only learn from history we would learn that "Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely." The arrogance of Presidents is because of the power we give them with no accountability, and the result has been absolute corruption.  Those envisioned this federal republic were afraid that that would happen, and they tried to build checks and balances into the structure of the republic.  But they also assumed an informed and critical citizenry.  Perhaps we need to reconsider the building blocks of procedural democracy in our times, how can we hold power accountable?  A liberal religious political theology must take our experience with politicians that distort the truth seriously.    To be a prophetic religion we must address the corruption of our time.

*For those who believe lying to mislead people into supporting a war is a characteristic of the Republicans, Johnson was a Democrat.  We can document the lies of Carter and Clinton to justify military misadventures as well.  Lying to the public is a bi-partisan activity. Based on long observation of the American Presidents, Native Americans  would observe that lying seems to be part of the job description.  Now some citizens might resist the Native claim, even though the facts show deliberate falsehoods were spoken by President after President,  those who identify as "white"  seem to think that the "savages" weren't real Americans.