Nietzsche called honesty "the youngest virtue," which was his deft way of pointing out that it hadn't been considered a virtue for very long. Right, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," so the prohibition against lying in court has been around for thousands of years. But all that praise of "honesty," "sincerity," or "authenticity" is rather new.

So I'm going to sit here and speak honestly and say that if clever deceit--not Sullivan's kind, the clever kind--isn't a virtue, then it's at least virtuoso, which is better. On the other hand, my honesty may be a moral virtue, but it surely isn't virtuoso; it's a weakness born of my malicious enjoyment of wounding the weak-minded with the truth. And still I indulge my vice of honesty.

Really, I hope we win the "War on Terror" with every strategem of deceit (and violence) and I don't care whether we have a right to be dishonest. There are occasions when it's just lovely to be dishonest and we're in the middle of one.