I’ve been thinking recently that in the future people will look back at this moment in history with astonishment -- a moment when this country went to war with popular approval because the president successfully persuaded us to confuse one man with another.

But I realize I shouldn’t be surprised that most of the country fell for this nonsense, because back in the 1980s most of the country fell for stories of outrageous, baroque, often literally impossible attacks on children in day-care centers. A reporter who helped bring that period of mass hysteria to an end -- a right-winger I consider a hero, Dorothy Rabinowitz -- has written a book about that period, called No Crueler Tyrannies. The New York Times review is here.

The best-known of these cases might have been the McMartin preschool case in California. Here’s a partial list of what investigators said took placed at the preschool, based on interviews with children that were later shown to be coercive (The full list is here): that the children

* were required to participate in "major, major sacrifices" connected with the "Satanic Church."

* saw an AWOL Marine sodomize a dog.

*saw dead and burned babies, flying witches, movie stars and local politicians.

* were taken to the airport, traveled to Palm Springs either in an airplane or hot air balloon, sexually abused and returned.

* were flushed down toilets, traveled through sewers to a place where adults sexually abused them, cleaned them up and later returned them to the pre-school so they could be picked up by their parents.

In some cases, grotesque and brutal acts were said to have taken place in rooms without doors, and yet people in adjoining rooms saw and heard nothing. Acts that would have left blood, bones, or other forensic evidence (including corpses) left nothing behind, according to investigators, yet these acts were readily assumed to have taken place.

Anyone who doubted the stories was told, "Believe the children.” This was a rallying cry. The irony, of course was that, as the Times review notes, “crusading child-abuse investigators ... alternately hounded and coaxed children into accusations they did not appear even to understand” -- these investigators themselves did not, in fact, “believe the children” unless the children told them what they expected to hear.

Here’s a list of American ritual-abuse cases. Many people were sent to prison for decades for acts of abuse they didn’t commit (and that, in many cases, no one ever committed). Many of these people are free now, but not all of them.

As a nation, we believed this crap. So maybe it’s no surprise that we now believe Iraqis flew planes into the World Trade Center at Saddam’s behest.

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I should add a few words of criticism to my praise of Dorothy Rabinowitz. I think she’s a hero because the country began to rethink its acceptance of this nonsense when she published debunking articles in Harper’s and The Wall Street Journal. But Rabinowitz attributed the abuse witch hunts to “political correctness,” and apparently still does.

It’s true that a lot of the therapists who believed there was an epidemic of grotesque ritualized abuse were left-leaning -- their thinking on this was an unfortunate left offshoot that was not unlike the anti-porn, anti-heterosexuality extremism of Andrea Dworkin. But the “Believe the children” crusade was not left-wing -- it was a “family values” crusade, as they used to say in the '80s, with a tinge of that decade’s rage to imprison “human scum.”

The first article I ever read about this subject was by Debbie Nathan in The Village Voice -- an article Rabinowitz herself cites. A liberal magazine, Harper’s, published Rabinowitz’s breakthrough story on the subject. And liberals still care about this: In The Nation, Katha Pollitt wrote an outraged column last year about Gerald Amirault, who was convicted on abuse charges in Massachusetts and is still in prison.

Many '60s liberals were becoming Big Chill/thirtysomething-style yuppies in those days; maybe Rabinowitz met a few too many of these. But to anyone on the left who thought, these convictions were an outrage.

It also seems to me that the tide should have turned for the people who were wrongly convicted in these cases when the Village Voice article appeared, rather than years later, when Rabinowitz began to write about the subject. At the time it appeared that no one took the subject seriously until a conservative wrote about it. As the saying goes, what liberal media?