Popular myths — Lenin called them “useful fictions” — are found across the ideological spectrum, but nowhere are they more prevalent than at the extremes of left and right. For example, many on the far right once insisted that President Eisenhower was a tool of the international communist conspiracy, as claimed by Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. That inspired the great line from Russell Kirk that “Eisenhower isn’t a communist, he’s a golfer.”

More recently, among the most common useful fictions heard on the left and in the mainstream media is the “Bush lied, people died” ditty. President Bush allegedly lied about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction as a means of deceiving Americans into supporting the war in 2003. Once Hussein was ousted and no WMDs were found, Bush’s deception became obvious, and the “Bush lied, people died” claim passed into the daily vernacular of politically correct discussion of the war in Iraq.