I did a program called Mondo Cane on internet radio.

I would appreciate your listening to it:

NEVER trust a person who uses the word “Liar” a lot.

I have known tens of thousands of people. My livelihood depended on knowing people. This is one rule I learned and this is one rule everybody is high-level politics knows.

A lot of people talk about how politicians lie. The fact is politicians lie to THEM. That is because they elect politicians who lie to them.

So if a politician sees a blond girl and a black guy, he will swear to everybody that it doesn’t bother him in the alightest . The voters will reject any white man running for public office who admits that he has a normal guy reaction to that.

Or anything else.

In talk asessions at bars or after work, when abortion is mentioned, almost everybody in professional politics wsill tell you it is not an issue they care much about.

But nobody will elect somebody who admits that this is an issue we wold rather not deal with.

I could give you more examples that you already know about, but the point here is that people elect politicians who lie to them, and they will not elect someone who does not swear to a lie. Then they get a kick out of being resentful about the fact that this guy they elected lies to them.

But you would be astonished at how honorable people really engaged in high-level politics are.

One of the t hings a staffer has to do on Capitol is “call the list.” If your boss has sponsored legislation and it is about to the reach the Floor for a vote, you know how most people will vote on it. Obviously, “the list” you call is members whose vote is not predictable.

You get a staff member. He either knows how his boss will vote or he says, “I’ll ask him.” He doesn’t guess.

In hardball politics your word is your only stock in trade.

Voters DEMAND to be lied to. They either like it, as when a white man says he has no gut reaction to a black guy in a backwards baseball cap and a beautiful blond, or, if the politician lies on an issue, the voter forgets about it by the next week, much less the next election.

So the saying is that a year is forever in politics.

But not in REAL politics. If you tell someone calling hte list your boss is going to vote aye and he votes nay, they will NEVER forget it. That’s why they say, “I’ll ask him.”

If they were talking to a voter, they would, “He’s on your side.” You NEVER do that to a pro without paying for it big-time.

Why? Because the word goes around that you LIED. LIE is a BIG word in big-time politics.

This is not just true in politics. I remember an instance where a man where a guy was talking about his house. He was talking about how much his house was worth. The man he was talking to said it was worth a million at least. He said, “Hell, I’ll sell it to you right now for half a million.”

The guy took him up on it.

He then said, “Look, I’ll you a hundred thousand right now to forget I said that.”

He had to sell his home to the man for half a million. And this was many years ago, when we would be talking five million right now. These guys were in the big time, and in the big time, in some fields, which is why I am not specifying the field they were in, your word is everything.

If you are a small-time person whose word means little, the word “liar” has no great important. It is a synonym for “mistaken.”

Such people are the reason the adjective “mean,” which means “little,” has come to mean someone who is cruel. “He’s mean dude” means he is a cruel person who has no class at all.

But this is not theoretical, it is practical. If you do not learn that a person uses the words “lie” or “liar” a lot has no word word worth giving you, you will pay for it enormously.

NEVER trust anyone who uses the words lie and liar freely.

Earnest money is a legal term. When you make a deal and you give the person you are dealing a dollar in “earnest money,” that is something that can be testified to in court.

The deals I have seen involved a hundred-dollar bill. If that hundred goes on the table, you had better be sure of what you are doing before you pick it up.

In my exchanges with joe ororke we keep talking about my use of words like “everybody” and “nobody” and “never.” His criticism was good and necessary, and I explained that a lot of times I use those words knowing they are not exactly true. The most obvious exception to “everybody knows” are the tens of thousands of people who are in a coma right now or who are on life support.

I know that. Yet I keep using “nobody” and “everybody.” I am stating an untruth when I know the exceptions. In other words, I am telling a lie, which is a statement that I know is untrue.

The problem is that if I were to be strictly accurate every time I made a statement I would have to list the exceptions. Your reaction would be that I am treating you like an idiot.

Being treated like an idiot is not just insulting, it is BORING. How long would you read this blog if I reeled off the list of exceptions to everything I said?

But joe has a point. I cannot use this reality to just declare everybody and nobody any time I want to.

Fortunately, this is not a new problem. The difference between a lie and poetic license goes back to the old Common Law distinction of earnest money.

Look at the article I just wrote. The average voter votes only for a politician who lies about his gut reaction to a beautiful blond and a black guy because the average voter is desperate to prove to himself that he is not a racist.

Unless the white politician is a true psychopath, the blond and black make his stomach turn. We know that. But the voter wants someone who will lie about it. So the politician is doing what voters want him to do.

The point is that that lie costs the voter nothing. There is no earnest money on it.

But if I am on Capitol Hill calling the list and a staffer lies to me about how his boss will vote. I report that lie to my boss. That costs me big time. You would be astonished how well your boss remembers exactly who is with him and who is against him on a particular piece of legislation that is critical to him.

So when you report a staffer’s lie about how his boss will vote, that is a lie with earnest money attached to it.

My boss paid a LOT to have senior staffer there to call the list, both in money and in power. If a staffer lied to me everybody on the Hill would know it FAST.

I called hundreds of list. I do not remember one single SENIOR staffer ever lying to me.

I would never tell you an untruth that would COST you something. I would never say something that is, strictly speaking, untrue if I did not expect you to understand the exceptions.

But you and joe have to keep reminding me of the line I am walking.