The Democratic National Committee sent an e-mail to supporters over the weekend asserting, “President Bush’s claim in the State of the Union that there were links between al Qaeda and Iraq should be another issue addressed by an independent, bipartisan investigation into his pattern of willful deception leading up to the war in Iraq, including his statement that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from Africa.”

“Pattern of willful deception”?

If Mr. Bush was engaged in a “pattern of willful deception” — and so far we’ve seen no evidence of either deception, willfulness, or a pattern — among those deceived were the 81 Democrats in the House of Representatives and 29 Democrats in the Senate who voted for the war resolution. The Congressional Democrats who voted for the war include four — Jos. Lieberman, John Edwards, Richard Gephardt, and John Kerry — who are running for president.

Which adds up to a curious political strategy for the Democrats. It reminds us, as Mickey Kaus has pointed out, of the comment of the Republican presidential candidate George Romney, who in 1967 said he had been “brainwashed” by American generals into supporting the war in Vietnam. Back then, Mr. Romney was laughed out of the campaign; now, decades later, the Democrats seem to be reviving this as a campaign slogan: “Vote for us, we were deceived!”

The New York Sun asked Mr. Lieberman yesterday about this “pattern of willful deception” claim. To his credit, the Democrat from the Nutmeg State said he would “wait and see” before making such an accusation. Alas, Mr. Lieberman didn’t exactly leap to criticize the DNC’s e-mail, either.

If Messrs. Lieberman, Edwards, Gephardt and Kerry, with their access to classified briefings, were duped, they are in fancy company. In March, the billionaire philanthropist George Soros gave a speech touting his hawkish views on removing the Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic from power, and asserting, “I am obviously in favor of removing Saddam, whom I consider to be an even more dangerous despot than Milosevic because of his chemical and biological weapons.” Yet last week, Mr. Soros took out newspaper advertisements describing the Bush administration’s statements in the run-up to the war as “exaggerated or even false.” A Soros spokesman, Michael Vachon, explained the turnaround by saying that Mr. Soros had been deceived.

Under the DNC theory, it wasn’t just four Democratic presidential candidates and a legendarily shrewd billionaire who were hornswoggled — it was Prime Minister Blair. And President Clinton, who in his public appearances has been remarkably gracious and supportive of Mr. Bush on the matter of the pre-war claims about weapons of mass destruction. Anyway, if the Democratic National Committee manages to convince the American people that its own leadership was so gullible as to be duped by one wily Texan, our guess is that the American people are going to be loath to trust the same Democratic leadership with responsibility for taking a skeptical look at the propaganda from our foreign enemies.