In its early days, Saturday Night Live got a lot of comedy mileage out of Chevy Chase satirizing President Gerald Ford’s clumsiness with exaggerated pratfalls and stumbles.

It wasn’t just SNL. Comedian Bob Hope piled on, saying you could always find Ford on the golf course by “following the wounded.” Bumping his head boarding the Marine helicopter on the White House lawn happened frequently enough that many remember Ford turning to the press once and saying, “It’s not my fault!”

Now it looks like the memo has gone out. Neocons have given new life to their old talking point: “It’s not my fault.”

“It’s not my fault” served them well in the Iraq War with its missing weapons of mass destruction. That calamity apparently wasn’t the fault of CIA Director George Tenet, although he had insisted that the case for the WMD war pretext was “a slam dunk.” There were already more than 11,000 American casualties in Iraq at the time Tenet was rewarded for his faultlessness with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It must not have been National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s fault either. Even after the elective war began, she insisted that “nobody doubted that he [Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction.”

That would have been a surprise to Hans Blix, the United Nations Chief Weapons Inspector. His team conducted hundreds of inspections inside Iraq right up until the invasion. It found no evidence of active WMD stockpiles or production in Iraq.

It would have surprised Mohamed ElBaradei, Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. IAEA inspectors found no indication of a resumed nuclear weapons program in Iraq and furthermore reported that documents the United States was using to make its case were forged. The W. Bush administration was forced to cancel a United Nations Security Council vote authorizing the invasion only hours before it began because most of the members doubted the claims that Rice said that “nobody doubted.”

But Rice must not have been at fault because she was promoted to Secretary of State.

In October 2004, the Iraq Survey Group presented its exhaustive report to Congress: Iraq did not possess any stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons at the time of the American invasion; its active programs had been destroyed more than a decade earlier, shortly after the 1991 Gulf War.

A month later President Bush was reelected, having successfully blamed the deadly fiasco on intelligence failures. Napoleon should have thought of that excuse for his fateful invasion or Russia.

The “it’s not their fault” talking point is so sturdy that Trump supporters and neocons are employing it again to disavow the role of the Iran War in one of the biggest electoral wipeouts in American history.

President Donald Trump initially lashed out at Fox News, blaming it for the midterm rout. Furthermore, it couldn’t possibly be his fault because he wasn’t on the ballot. If he had been, Trump explained with characteristic humility, the outcome would have been different.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that everyone was frustrated about fuel prices, but that is not related to policies.

Huh? Not related to policies?

In September, commentators Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro came together to assure viewers the Iran was an inconsequential issue in the election. “It doesn’t appear that Iran is going to drive anything one way or another,” squawked Levin. “That’s exactly right,” Shapiro echoed. Then the day before the election, anticipating a loss, Levin insisted, “It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not the president’s fault.”

The disavowals quickly became comical. Tim Burchett is a “dadgummit” country Tennessee congressman of occasional sensibility. But perhaps because he is angling hard to be appointed to fill Marsha Blackburn’s Senate seat, he offered a ludicrous analysis on the day after the election:

What we did wrong. https://t.co/kIoEy9zoH1

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) November 5, 2026

The chief reason for the naked repudiation of Trumpism is affordability, he said, credibly enough. Then he attributed the cost of diesel fuel to oil companies using Hormuz as an excuse for high prices.

Washington’s Iran war, the largest oil disruption in history, went otherwise unmentioned.

Tankers set ablaze and destroyed, immobilized shipping, uninsurable supertankers in the Persian Gulf war zone, production facilities and refineries that have been damaged or shut down, storage facilities and pipelines that have been attacked…wouldn’t one think that figures into the assessment somewhere?

But that would lay the crushing rejection directly at the warmaker’s feet. And it is never their fault.

I responded to Burchett on Twitter/X with a three-year chart of domestic oil prices. It shows the price trending slightly lower until the end of February (apparently oil companies, with their supposed unilateral control over prices, weren’t greedy until that moment). Suddenly, with the falling bombs, prices gapped up.

Way up.

It was an incredible bonanza for informed (or very lucky) speculators frontrunning Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts about the war as he sent prices rollercoasting up and down with his ever-changing gameshow hints of an Iran deal or no deal.

Although President Trump had encroached on Rep. Burchett’s and his congressional colleagues’ authority to declare war, it’s centrality to the rising price of energy and food was missing in action. Otherwise Trump and his Washington sycophants would have had something to do with one of the most humiliating repudiations in American history.   

It fell to Vice President J.D. Vance to be the boy that pointed out the naked Empire. “The reason we lost is the war,” he said in a post-mortem.

But the scales didn’t fall from all eyes. Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, responded saying, “I think it’s unfortunate that many made the linkage between the rising prices, mainly the oil prices and the situation in Iran.” Then, in the most brazen act of hand-washing since Pilate, he said “The decision to attack Iran was the decision of the United States. It wasn’t our decision. We supported the U.S. effort.”

It has been a season of miracles, with prices miraculously skyrocketing spontaneously and voters mysteriously pivoting without cause. However, financial commentator Mish Shedlock was able to identify one specific miracle and its miracle worker. He congratulated Donald Trump for turning Texas blue.

That, he said, was something no mere mortal could have done.