The two voting blocs that switched from the Democrats to the Republicans and caused the Reagan landslide were Southern whites and Northern Irish.

After the meetings of the “politicals” on Thursday evening, me and an Irishman from Philadelphia would usually have a talk. Neither of us could understand why the Yankee Republicans were so hoplessly bad at politics.

One evening I told him a Catholic joke where the Catholic came out on top.

He said, “Why isit that every Catholic joke I hear, the Catholics come out on top?”

He had me dead to rights. I was being patronizing.

You NEVER tell a joke where a Jew ends up looking silly. You NEVER tell a joke where you make fun of a black. They cancelled Amos ‘n Andy for that.

Jews, blacks and Hispanics are Official Minority Groups and they expect you to know it. Gays are likewise. They used to be univesally ridiculed. Now they must be universally praised.

So what my buddy was saying was, “What do you think we Catholic Irish are, a friggin’ minority group? You think we can’t take it?”

So when I worked in the Chicago steelworker district, I would never have DARED refer to them as “Polish People” the way the sitcoms do. They were Pollacks and proud of it.

That was then. This is now. Everybody now knows the word “patronizing.” But today you better call them “Polish People” and the Catholic better come out on top.

As with so many other things, everybody knows the buzzword, but nobody knows what it means.

Today if you don’t want to be patronizing, you have to patronize.

In my old “Partisan Dictionary” which I wrote in the Southern Partisan in the early 1980s, the following definiton appeared,

“Manners, n,

A formalized substitute for courtesy.”

Manners if doing whatever is fashionable and written down. Courtesy is concern for the other person.

By the same token, “ethics” is written down. Honesty, like courtesy, needs no explanation.

I have pointed out that the moment someone said something to me that sounded like they were getting around to “something you would like to have,” I would quote to them the Draconian penalties for bribing a staffer.

This was often unfair. I had honestly misinterpreted where they were leading. But it also gave me a certain reputation as a person who could not be trusted with even a hint of a bribe.

Why, exactly, was I so nasty about such hints of offers?

“well, Bob, it’s because you were raised in the Bible Belt. The Book taught you that ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor’ even if they pay you.”

And that is what really worries me about Wordists. My ancestors were proud to die to a man around the leader they had sworn fealty to long before the Gospel, much less the Old Testament, ever got to them.

I don’t lie, I don’t cheat, I don’t steal, and I honor my word not because some Book told me to be that way, but because I AM that way.

If you want to know about someone, let them talk. When a person justifies honesty by quoting a Book, you had better put your wallet in a safe place.

His Book can change tomorrow. His INTERPRETATION of his Book can change tomorrow.

Honesty is what an honest man takes for granted.

Wordism is for psychopaths.

I have pointed out that one of the rules of interrogration, hell, one of the rules of living in this world, is that when someone talks, he is telling you all about himself. The specific example I keep giving is that if someone keeps using the words “lie” and “liar,” his word is not to be trusted.

If you do not understand THAT up front, you are going to have some real troubles in life.

When I was on Capitol Hill, there were about twenty thousand people employed there. The group I knew were the people like me, those you could call at 2 am at their desks.

I read a book called “Workaholics.” It made me feel better because it pointed out that while a lot of people think New York is the center of workaholism, actually that center is Washington, DC. So my impression was generally corret.

But in this fallen world nothing is perfect. Washington was also polluted by the presence of sane people.

The point is that I had little contact with sane people. I dealt with the OTHER workaholics. So if you ask me my impressions of Capitol Hill or the Reagan Administration, I will tell you about lights on at 2 am, about peole who were wildly dedicated to what they were doing.

My enemies were the same way. I could reach Chris Matthews at 2 am as well as I could at 10am, often better. In the former case, his secretary wasn’t in the way.

But I began this piece by saying that the first rule of knowing people is that when they talk they tell you all about themselves.

If someone who worked in exactly the same place I did did not talk about workaholics but about bribes and scandal, he would have far more interesting story, and it is probably true.

Such a person ended up in tne middle of group where bribes, scandal, payoffs and other exciting things were the facts of life.

That tells you a lot about the realities of power that he was familiar with.

It also tells you a lot about him.