Presidents, Voters, and Virginity Pledges

Reuters has a story that is really about a piece of meta-research, with a somewhat more compeling hook:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teenagers who take pledges to remain virgins until marriage are likely to deny having taken the pledge if they later become sexually active. Conversely, those who were sexual active before taking the pledge frequency deny their sexual history, according to new study findings.

...

According to Rosenbaum, "it's not possible to know why pledgers retracted their sexual history since it's impossible to know whether respondents actually had sex."

"Psychology studies in a variety of contexts seem to demonstrate that people's memories of their behavior are consistent with their beliefs rather than their actual behavior," she told Reuters Health, adding that "anecdotally, some people seem to feel like the answer which is strictly true may not represent themselves accurately."

You may think I'm about to launch into an attack on the folly of Abstinence-Only Education. Nope. The problem is much, much worse.

Presidents who make pledges to rid dictators of WMDs are likely to deny having taken the pledge if they later do not find WMDs.<
Politicians who vow to find the perpetrators of a terrorist attack, dead or alive, often retract their rhetorical history.
If the President thinks that things are going well, he won't be able to remember any mistakes.
Conversely, if things are going poorly, the President is likely to remember the problem as having started with his predecessor.

If a President thinks of himself as Commander-in-Chief, he's not likely to remember skipping out on guard duty.

Feel free to add to the list, but I'm going to shift gears.

If a voter disapproves of Bush now, they're less likely to remember voting for him.
If a voter disapproves of the war now, they're less likely to remember cheering for it in 2003.

Why does this make me upset? Because this kind of behavior prevents lessons from being learned.
People who let themselves be manipulated by the media will let themselves be manipulated again.
Why? Because they will either 'remember' how they bucked the media narrative, or how the media then agreed with their position now.
No one could have predicted planes as missiles.
No one could have foreseen the breech of the levees.
We have always been at war with Eurasia.

So anyway, this is why we need the internet. This is why we need research. And this is why we need smart people running the show. People who understand that things aren't always as they seem and that sometimes archives are better than witnesses.
I don't remember liberals doing this type of self-delusion. All the time, anti-choice activists seem to forget their pre-marital concerns. Pro-Spying folks forget their anti-big governmenrt rants. Us, not so much. Perhaps it's because of the pride we take in belonging to the reality-based community. Perhaps it is because my memory is more consistent with my beliefs than with actual behavior.

Whichever.

Let the best evidence win.