At the end of an article about Karl Rove and the Republican “Talking Points” that explain — with a perfectly straight face and all the faux sincerity they can muster — how Rove was really just trying to save reporters from accidentally publishing inaccurate news stories, Mark Shields says,

All of this raises one nagging question: Just how dumb do the Bush people believe we are, that we would swallow, for even a nanosecond, the fabrication that Karl Rove’s only motive in calling reporters was to discourage inaccurate stories? Do they really think we are that stupid? — Mark Shields, How dumb do they think we are? (July 18, 2005) CNN.

And all of that raises an ever greater nagging question: Just how dumb is Mark Shields not to realize that the White House has things right for a change.

Americans really are — not all of them, but enough of them — dumb enough to accept this. There’s a reason Karl Rove hasn’t been fired yet: The President of the United States realizes that it doesn’t matter. As a whole, Americans don’t care.

If Americans did care, some of the more overt acts of treason would have been stopped long before Karl Rove passed along Top Secret CIA information to reporters.