A story in today’s LA Times explores the fear and loathing on the anti-war left as the Obama administration begins to take form:

The activists are uneasy not only about signs that both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates could be in the Obama Cabinet, but at reports suggesting that several other short-list candidates for top security posts backed the decision to go to war.

“Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning,” said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of the 54-chapter Iraq Veterans Against the War.

This inquisition raises some interesting questions. These are the same groups which insist America was lied into war by the Bush administration. The corollary of this claim is that those who voted to authorize force in 2002 did so under the influence of a campaign of manipulation by the Bush administration, which employed false intelligence to build its case for war. John Edwards, to take an obvious example, in 2005 repudiated his 2002 vote, writing in a Washington Post op-ed that Iraq intelligence was “manipulated to fit a political agenda.” In other words, the John Edwardses of the world should be added to the list of victims of the Iraq War, not counted as its perpetrators. Anti-war groups responded to this moral reorganization by congratulating the bravery of those who stepped forward to declare that they, too, were casualties of the Bush administration.

But now the anti-war cadres are crestfallen that Barack Obama is filling his cabinet not with members of the Bread & Puppet Theater, but with some people who voted to allow the war. Earnest questions: If those who voted to authorize force in 2002 did so only under the sway of a campaign of lies, why is their participation in the Obama administration problematic? Or more precisely, why is it problematic on anti-war grounds, rather than on the grounds that such people, if they did fall for neocon disinformation, are too gullible to serve in high office?

And if such people were not, after all, lied into war, and must be barred from the Obama administration because they made a disastrously foolish foreign policy decision in 2002, then what remains of the validity of the Bush-lied-people-died narrative?

It’s been five and a half years since the start of the Iraq war, and many of its detractors still can’t get their story straight.