There are a lot of voters who think most politicians will say whatever it takes to get elected. I had coffee with a friend just this morning who dismissed Mitt Romney’s latest shift on abortion—he told the Des Moines Register that “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda”—the same way. No big deal because politicians do it all the time.

That sort of blanket cynicism blinds people to just how outrageously shameless and morally hollow Romney is willing to be. It’s gotten so bad that the following rule is no exaggeration: If Romney’s lips are moving and he’s talking about abortion, he is lying.

Oh, sure, he put enough weasel words in that one statement that he could argue it’s not a complete lie. Although Romney wrote in the National Review last year that he would “advocate for and support a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion,” he can claim that he’s not familiar with an existing piece of legislation that does just that. Similarly, the Romney-Ryan campaign website says, “As president, [Romney] will end federal funding for abortion advocates like Planned Parenthood.” But Romney doesn’t have to make that part of his agenda. He simply has to sign the bill a GOP-controlled Congress sends to him.

But littering your speech with so many weaselly qualifiers that you can tell everyone that you’ve left yourself open to adopting their position is no virtue. The nation rightly mocked Bill Clinton for parsing the definition of “is.” And when your defense is that you haven’t technically lied, you’ve lost any claim to moral rectitude.

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