Want to get in trouble in politics?

So why do politicians lie so often? Is it a shortcut to better ends, a cold utilitarian calculation they all make? Is it because fundamentally dishonest people are disproportionately drawn to politics? Or is it maybe because the single best way to get in real trouble in politics-- even more sure fire than say visiting your Argentine mistress on the state's dime or propositioning the House pages-- is by actually stating a glaringly obvious truth? Well I suppose it could be a combination of two options or all three, but the third definitely has to be part of the explanation.
Remember the huge trouble Hillary Clinton suggesting that while no one would deny his importance or heroism it was just possible that other people besides Martin Luther King Jr. may have played a role in ending segregation. You know like LB J who not only signed both the civil rights and voting rights bills into law, but used every ounce of his political skill and a good bit of his political capital to get those bills through congress. Or the scandal that erupted when Howard Dean dared to state the screamingly obvious fact that capturing Hussein, who had no links to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group that had ever actually attacked us and who wasn't even in power, would do absolutely nothing to make us safer from terror? Or perhaps when the Kossacks drove that Stranahan fellow from their little village for saying that maybe there was something to those rumors that John Edwards was cheating on his wife?
Well Obama seems to have had just such an experience. Apparently he's felt enough heat from the controversy that he saw the need to call up Sgt. Crowley for having the utter temerity to state the obvious fact that the Crowley acted stupidly in arresting a man in his own home. And whatever you think about Gates getting arrested can you really deny, given all the trouble he's put himself through, that Crowley acted stupidly?
(Though I suppose in fairness to both Obama and Crowley maybe he thinks that the call is simply the best way to make this nonsense go away for all of them. Truth be told Crowley's probably done a fair penance for his stupidity and whenever Gates gets around to writing the inevitable book about all this he'll be laughing all the way to the bank. I do like Crowley's suggestion about having a beer to smooth it over. Note that I never said the man was stupid, just that he acted stupidly).