WASHINGTON (AP) – If an exterminator came to your home, fumigated the place and then concluded there no were varmints to begin with, he might land himself in trouble with the Better Business Bureau.

It’s supposed to be a golden rule from the schoolyard to the corporate suite and beyond: truth or consequences.

When it comes to the politics of oops, though, things are different.

Whether it’s the faulty prewar intelligence that President Bush relied on or Bill Clinton’s tangle with kissing-and-telling, getting caught on the wrong side of reality need not be fatal for a career.

Bush is scarcely troubled despite acknowledging that the charge that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the main rationale for the war, was not borne out by the facts.

His administration’s acknowledgment last week that the fruitless search had ended came as no surprise; inspectors reported they were coming up empty before voters re-elected Bush in November.

Politicians, by definition, are accountable. But they are not always held to account when their certitude proved wrong.

Bush sounded a little like President Reagan during the Iran-Contra jam when he addressed the weapons search in an ABC interview broadcast Friday night. It turns out that his conviction was based on a feeling, not really fact, just as Reagan’s was when he asserted he had never traded arms for hostages.

Several assertions about Iraq have proved inoperative. Along with the faulty weapons claim, the administration made allegations linking al-Qaida to now-ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that withered under scrutiny.

Investigators also concluded that aluminum tubes suspected of being used for nuclear bomb development in Iraq were probably meant for conventional rockets, and that there was no evidence Iraq sought uranium abroad after 1991. Both points contradicted Bush’s claims before the war.

Bush has not wavered from the belief that he made the right decision to go to war and would do so again, arguing that Saddam was a danger and that the world, the United States and Iraq are now safer.

Clinton’s deceptions during the Monica Lewinsky affair (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”) brought him extraordinary trouble, including an impeachment trial. Still he survived to complete his term and bring his reputation back into balance. For him, the oops was in getting caught doing something he knew he shouldn’t at the time.

The catalog of presidential deceptions over the years is familiar; bad judgment calls made in good faith are murkier.

One chart-topper in the former category: President Lyndon Johnson’s winning congressional approval for prosecution of the Vietnam War with a false claim that U.S. warships had come under an unprovoked attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. The deception came out after the war.

But it remains a mystery, despite decades of examination, whether President Franklin Roosevelt had the pre-Pearl Harbor intelligence to foresee a strike by Japan. Also, Johnson had no idea how deep the United States would sink in Vietnam – that half a million soldiers would not prevail.

Anything to do with the economy is ripe for oops, and Bush has had some of those, too. His administration predicted the nation would create 3.6 million jobs in 2004 – the election year – but job growth was half that.

Bush was saddled in the campaign with comparisons to Herbert Hoover, the last president before him to lose jobs over a four-year term.

Hoover committed an oops for the ages when he declared in his 1929 inauguration speech that “we have reached a higher degree of comfort and security than ever existed before in the history of the world. … In no nation are the fruits of accomplishment more secure.”

The Great Depression followed. Voters exacted consequences, electing FDR.

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