You have to wonder. Standing on the tarmac in France before meetings with European foreign ministers, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained to reporters that for Iran to ever get nuclear weapons would be crazy. "Look what they're willing to do with the weapons they have now."

It doesn't seem that out of the ordinary that a country attacked repeatedly by the most fearsome nation on earth and its companion war provocateur should want to use the weapons in has now in self-defense. Rubio knows who attacked whom and is trafficking in cluelessness on the part of the assembled press.

Recall, too, the ignoble ending that Libya's Colonel Gaddafi met (Don't ask; its too revolting) upon giving up his rudimentary nuclear development program as a rapprochement with the United States and United Kingdom. It was not lost on Kim Jong-un that both John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence offered North Korea "the Libya model." That unappetizing prospect made plain to Kim and others that countries with nuclear deterrence don't get attacked by the U.S, global military empire.

Satirist H.L. Mencken observed that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the masses of plain people. But they can only take so much, as I am discovering in promoting my new book EMPIRE OF LIES: Fragments from the Memory Hole, which describes the Deep State's means and methods for stampeding the American people into endless, senseless wars. I have spent much of the last few months going on radio talk shows, television, and podcasts. It has exposed me to a cross-section of American opinion, from news people, show hosts, and their callers and viewers.

Before I go further, let me say that this is not a virginal experience for me, as I have been both a newsman and show host myself and have made similar promotional rounds before. Perhaps the most relevant comparison is with attitudes I discovered in objecting to W. Bush's elective and disastrous Iraq war.

Both then and now it is discouraging to note how readily people pick up and echo the utterances of Washington's warmongers and Fox News. These unexamined talking points become memes that spread lightning-like in social media and in popular debate. In the Iraq War it was nonsense like "the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud," and the equally nonsensical "Axis of Evil," consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

Here are three leading memes I have encountered this time around.

First, that Iran has been at war with us for forty-seven years. That talking point might have been stillborn due to the early insistence that what the United States was doing in Iran wasn't actually a war. For some, like the ever-bellicose Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), it both isn't a war and they've been at war with us for forty-seven years, each asserted in the same breath. Cotton also offered up that Iran has been an "imminent threat" for 47 years. That's one heck of a long imminence! With the U.S. and Israel having struck some 15,000 Iranian targets in the first month, not to mention the White House suddenly asking for a $200 billion supplemental war appropriation, it has been hard to maintain the fiction that this isn't a war. Except for some diehards like the president himself, that contention has mostly disappeared.