Jim Comey will be lucky to come out of this without whiplash. Having gone from hero to villain to hero and back again, he’s now beloved for being the butt of Trump’s angst. Getting fired by someone hated is the new resurrection. Look what it did for people who should otherwise be rightly despised, like former Southern District United States Attorney Preet Bharara and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. People speak of them in glowing terms, even though they know nothing more about them than that Trump fired them.

But in comes the newest Messiah, Bob Mueller, FBI Director under Bush and Obama. Scanning the tube after the announcement of Rod Rosenstein’s appointment, the love just oozed off the screen. There weren’t enough adjectives to praise Mueller. Jeffrey Toobin was fully erect, though it may have had something to do with his sitting next to Dersh. It was a moment of glorious agreement between the sides that Mueller would bring a nation together.

Marcy Wheeler then splashed cold water over the choir.

Rod Rosenstein just appointed former FBI Director (and, before that, US Attorney) Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to take over the investigation into Trump and his associates.

I’m agnostic about the selection of Mueller. He has the benefit of credibility among FBI Agents, so will be able to make up for some of what was lost with Jim Comey’s firing. He will be regarded by those who care about such things as non-partisan. With Jim Comey, Mueller stood up to Dick Cheney on Stellar Wind in 2004 (though I think in reality his willingness to withstand Cheney’s demands has been overstated).

But Mueller has helped cover up certain things in the past, most notably with the Amerithrax investigation.

Marcy is right, of course, that Bob Mueller isn’t perfect. What Fibber-cum-prosecutor is? But Marcy is also right to remind us that our rush to simplistically vilify or glorify people, to turn them into heroes and villains, is similarly misguided. We may want a perfect person so desperately in this time of pervasive imperfection that we go overboard at every turn.

Remember how much we loved Mueller when he was FBI Director No? That’s right. They didn’t build statues to him when he left the post. Most people had no clue who he was. He had no great accomplishments, aside from staying in the job for 12 years without getting fired or indicted, that made him America’s darling. Yet, here he is, a darling, indeed.

But more than a person who is so unflawed that he could marry Caesar, Mueller has two characteristics that are desperately lacking these days. The first is the skillset to do this job. His experience as prosecutor and FBI director is obvious. The second is his impeccable reputation for being legit, a non-partisan law enforcement hardass. Yes, he was a hardass, but he’s expected to be that same hardass when it comes to this investigation as he was when we lived in more normal times.

Marcy doesn’t seem to put much stock in Mueller’s acceptance by both political parties as a non-partisan. Yet that seems to be his critical qualification, as he’s the guy who can be trusted, regardless of what his investigation reveals, to conduct it without fear or favor. He’s an old man, with as many feathers in his cap as he’s going to get, and has no future job or legacy to protect, so whatever happens, everybody will believe it’s true if Bob Mueller says so.

The investigation will go on, now under the leadership of a former F.B.I. director — and this one the president can’t fire on his own. Robert Mueller III, who was named special counsel on Wednesday to oversee the Trump-Russia investigation, is charged with revealing the truth about suspicions that reach into the highest levels of the Trump campaign and White House.

While there appears to be widespread trust that Mueller will be the non-partisan that the nation needs, that relates only to the trust that he will not favor one side of the political war over the other. There is an entirely different view of partisanship, unrelated to Trump or politics, that is missing from the kisses blown in Mueller’s direction.

But there’s another kind of partisan, as Marcy remind us. Mueller is a prosecutor. Mueller will “get to the bottom” of this from a prosecutor’s perspective. He can empanel a grand jury, subpoena documents and witnesses, and ascertain whether the mythology the media has leaped to believe has any basis in fact.

He will not, however, find the truth, because a prosecutor is only one side of the equation. His investigation will not include the defense against the allegations. Just as we remind people regularly in every indictment not involving the dreaded Trump, an indictment is merely an accusation. Afterward, we conduct a trial, where the other side gets due process, the benefit of law and its chance to defend against the accusation.

Given the “unique circumstances” of the case, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in making the appointment, a special counsel “is necessary in order for the American people to have full confidence in the outcome” of the investigation.

Given the political polarization, we need to believe that if Mueller completes his investigation with a finding that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign, its staff, his family, Trump himself, and Russia, then that ends the question and we can go back to hating Trump for the million other reasons.

Yet, if the outcome is that he finds there is probable cause to believe that wrongdoing occurred, it does not mean we can have “full confidence in the outcome” of the investigation, as it’s just the view from one side in the partisan battle between prosecution and defense. In our zeal to shower Mueller with adoration, let’s not forget his limits, his perspective, his job.

And should Bob Mueller come back with a finding that there was no collusion, no conspiracy, no wrongdoing, will he still be standing atop the pedestal of blind trust? Jim Comey was every bit as trusted and accepted as a person of integrity as Mueller, until he wasn’t.

Even if he made some dubious choices in dealing with perhaps the most bizarre scenario in American politics, that doesn’t explain why he was denigrated as a shill for one side or the other, shifting with each utterance. If Comey could become the foil of our mindless need to find some external blame, will Mueller enjoy any better? Or are we beyond the point where anyone can be trusted if they don’t give us the outcome we so desperately want?