...Crazy Uncle Charlie, who somehow escaped from the attic apartment at Grandma's house, and who is presently running naked down the street and flipping off all the neighbors as he passes by, yelling "Who's got the big one? I do!"

It turns out that vivid commercials are incredibly good at tricking the hippocampus (a center of long-term memory in the brain) into believing that the scene we just watched on television actually happened. And it happened to us.

SNIP

Although we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them, they aren't. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. What's disturbing, of course, is that we can't help but borrow many of our memories from elsewhere, so that the ad we watched on television becomes our own, part of that personal narrative we repeat and retell.

Priest Helping Pope With Pedophilia Reforms Arrested For Pedophilia

My only objection to Perlstein's otherwise good article is that HHH wasn't always a liberal hawk on the war.  In fact, it could be plausibly argued he was only out there toeing a line that his boss, Lyndon, insisted he toe.  

Perlstein apparently also isn't aware that Humphrey early on in the Johnson admin, sent LBJ an unsolicited memo warning him about greater US military involvement over there, and that the landslide election victory against the hawkish Goldwater gave Johnson the political room to begin a US disengagement.  But LBJ was not happy getting this advice, as he'd privately already committed to escalation, and soon made HHH persona non grata at the WH (and also Johnson may have begun tapping his VP's office phones at this time -- LBJ was paranoid, and suspected his #2 of disloyalty).

For me, Humphrey was a decent but flawed pol -- flawed in not having a sufficiently strong enough character to resist the constant bullying of his boss Lyndon.  In the '68 campaign, towards the end, as Hubert tried to semi-distance himself from Lyndon on Nam, it was a case of too little too late, tentative independent steps Hubert later regretted not being bolder about.

No question also that had he become prez, now with no bully to boss him around, he would have ended that war far sooner than Nixon did, and w/o all the bombing and invading other countries that Nixon engaged in.