At some point in the development of their political awareness, most Americans begin to suspect that honesty is a warped, or more appropriately -- warpable, concept to the successful politician. It's one of those disconcerting realities which leaves a bad taste in the mouth when we think about the standards of the people who run our country.

And, lest we forget at some point and naively begin to regain our trust, new and blatant situations inevitably arise to serve in keeping our cynicism on track.

Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, while making waves over a dispute with CIA Director William Webster, has emerged as the latest politician to reinforce this disenchantment. The core of the Cheney/Webster conflict concerns the appropriateness of telling the truth.

As Secretary of Defense, Cheney is a politician in a political role. Along with President Bush, he determines policy objectives and then manufactures ideologically-rooted (and yet usually quite glib) arguments in an attempt to gain congressional support.

Within the same administration, CIA Director Webster is a professional in a professional role. He is responsible for gathering accurate and unbiased information from various agents and then using that information to provide analyses of foreign situations.

This arrangement works smoothly as long as the accurate and unbiased intelligence estimates support the administration's policy objectives. But of course, it is operating in the political arena, and thus the truth inevitably tends to get in the way.

Two weeks ago, Cheney was confronted with this annoyance as he addressed a congressional committee about the necessity of approving $306 billion in defense spending for 1991. His main argument centered around the need to remain capable in the face of the Soviet military threat.

Despite recent Soviet reductions in troop numbers and weaponry and the well-publicized accounts of Gorbachev cavorting through the world's capitals with an olive branch in his teeth, Cheney argued that the changes "are still relatively easy to reverse," and that the United States "must be prepared to remain in long-term competition with the Soviets."

Unbeknownst to Cheney, Webster had presented a completely different view to the House Armed Services Committee earlier on the same day. His intelligence estimates have indicated that the political changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe "are probably already irreversible in several critical aspects," and he believed it was doubtful that the Soviets could rise as a substantial military threat at any time in the near future.

Webster seems pretty sure of this analysis, even if Gorbachev is ousted and replaced by some militaristic hard-liner who eats dissidents for breakfast. He told Congress, "A successor regime would face the same types of economic and political pressures that President Gorbachev has and would probably continue to pursue arms-control agreements with the West."

As would be imagined, congressional Democrats, armed with this discrepancy, gleefully tore Cheney's argument for the defense budget into barely-recognizable shreds. In fact, poor Secretary Cheney must have looked a bit foolish as he brought out the old "evil empire" horror stories to an audience that already had the not-too-frightening facts.

Just like any other important politician with immensely swollen pride, Cheney didn't take the Capitol Hill ridicule too well. He vented his frustrations in an interview with CNN and insisted that, as part of the team, Webster was obligated to reflect the president's views on the defense budget.

Said Cheney, "There is no question but that it would be easier for me in terms of getting congressional approval of the budget that the President sent up if in fact there were a little more restraint in (Webster's) statements."

In other words, if Webster has just stretched the truth a bit and made the Soviets sound more menacing, then Cheney might have had a better chance of getting those extra "stealth" bombers (or MX missiles or Trident submarines or "Star Wars" laser-energized missile dehydrators) that he's been salivating over.

In the minds of politicians like Cheney, the truth is open to distortion. Standards of honesty, as revered by us common folk in the American heartland, have long been abandoned by the policymakers in Washington.

Unfortunately, this political aversion to the truth is no longer limited to the gilded, "come hither and bring thy vote" promises of the campaign trail. Nowadays, the first step for a politician with an agenda to pursue is to hone his misinformation skills and craft an arsenal of supporting fiction. Whoever said the art of storytelling is dead?

By expressing his indignation at being confronted with the facts, Secretary Cheney just perpetuates the ongoing circumvention of truth, and further relegates the concept of "trust in government" to being merely a feeble laugh-getter in late-night comedy monologues.