I don't know how convinced I am that Bush was responsible for all of this (he was clearly a major contributor, but there is plenty of blame to go around). But I think the general point hits the nail on the head. I was just reading something that Aaron wrote (that BenoitEssiambre linked to earlier) here: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis

When Oprah started defending fabulist James Frey, she was savaged by the press. So she invited her critics on the show and apologized, saying “You were right, I was wrong.” It didn’t destroy her reputation; it rescued it. When the space shuttle Columbia exploded, launch manager Wayne Hale took full responsibility: “The bottom line is that I failed to understand what I was being told…I am guilty of allowing Columbia to crash.” He was promoted. When JFK admitted the responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco was “mine, and mine alone,” his poll numbers soared.

People, for good reason, like it when other people own their mistakes. But we've built bureaucracies that don't. They have far too rigid accountability rules. Everything you do gets put in your file, and the file is what it takes you get you fired when someone wants to get rid of you for internal political reasons, so everyone has to be sure they never admit they've done anything wrong. "For crying out loud, man, don't improve our ability to detect mistakes, those mistakes go in or records!"

The criminal justice system works the same way. If you admit what you did, you get punished. If you deny it successfully you go free. But we can't have criminals going free, so we make it impractical for "normal criminals" to deny anything successfully. Then your choice becomes to confess and face punishment or assert your innocence and face an even larger punishment -- a choice that doesn't depend on whether you were actually guilty or innocent, or whether you should have been guilty or innocent under a more just set of laws.

So we get where we are: If you get accused of something the penalties are absurd, so if you're a big Wall St. guy with a billion dollars, you spend a fortune on the Big Lie and get out of any real punishment whatsoever, and if you're not a millionaire then you plead guilty regardless of your guilt so that you "only" go to prison for six months instead of six years.

And then we wonder where prosecutors and politicians possibly got the idea that the Big Lie is the way to go.