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.