Mark Shea is shocked, shocked! that President Bush was not telling the whole truth about Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s job security before the election.

It’s hard sometimes walking that fine line between angelistic naïvete and resigned cynicism; and so I hardly blame Mark for drifting off in the direction of the former here. But I do hope he won’t let pride—in being a skeptic, in having high standards, in not being an unthinking apologist for anyone—keep him from drifting back in the right direction once he’s able to take a good calm look at the big picture.

If one can’t stand being lied to, one would be advised not to listen to any politician ever, even the most honorable of them. Man is, after all, a fallen creature; and national political life is especially good at putting even the most honest men in pickles that it’s hard to get out of without “dissembling”. Wisdom in political life comes from learning to distinguish between fibs that can be shrugged off and those that should set off alarm bells.

Maybe it’s just my partisan colors showing here, but for my part, I find the Rummy turnaround irksome and disappointing, but not an outrage, nor a disturbing sign that lying is a way of life for this Administration. So, while I made sure to get my tut-tuts in, I’m shrugging. Just as I’ll shrug when Hillary officially declares her candidacy for the Presidency, and some of the more excitable folks crank up the campaign’s first official chorus of “HILLARY LIED!!!!!!!!!!”

Oh, and one more thing. I must say that as a football fan, I am way too familiar with the Dreaded Vote Of Confidence to have been surprised by any of this. The Rumsfeld business was in fact a textbook case of how the DVOC works.