Democrats were reducing dissonance too, but in a different way: by actually forgetting that they originally were in favor of the war. Before the invasion, about 46 percent of Democrats supported it; by 2006, only 21 percent remembered having done so. Just before the war, 72 percent of Democrats said they thought Iraq had WMDs, but later, only 26 percent remembered having believed this. To maintain consonance, they were saying, in effect, “I knew all along that Bush was lying to us.”12
