Why Defend Exaggeration?

Breaking ... Jimmy Carter was not actually a nuclear engineer, and Ronald Reagan did not actually witness the liberation of concentration camps.

Like a lot of politicians, President Obama very much included, Marco Rubio shaded his biography to make his life story slightly more compelling.

Sometimes he framed his words in ways that allowed his audience to hear more of an identification with their own experience than literally occurred.

It's happened before, and it will happen again. And in the great scheme of things, the shading detected by the Washington Post hardly seems a great scandal. Especially since - just as Rubio says - his family were soon enough made exiles: cut off from their native soil and their relatives entrapped in the old country.

The real danger in the story is not what Rubio has said, but the defenses his supporters are beginning to offer for him.

Rubio exaggerated, he was caught, he should correct the record, it's not the end of the world. But allowing him to argue that his story is "essentially" true opens a door that conservatives should want to keep closed. Remember, this is the party that professes to oppose moral relativism and situational ethics.

Henry Kissinger once quipped that in the Bush administration, the policies were better than the explanations. That was a joke, but actually bad explanations can kill even good policies. In the same way, excuses that seem outright to condone untruth do a lot more harm to everybody involved than an apology that acknowledges the familiar fact that politicians do not always tell the exact truth.