Politicians’ lies already creating jobs, industries

I used to think that one of the most boring jobs in the world must belong to the people who research and expose our politicians’ lies. After one of the last electoral debates, I read an online list of the lies each politician had spoken and had to use the ‘page down’ button almost a dozen times! And that was just hours after the event! Imagine - there are separate departments in organizations, in fact, whole companies just engaged in parsing and researching each spoken statement for the extent of its falsehood.

Till recently, I used to wonder how it would feel to depend on other peoples’ ability to lie to prove your own skill, and have your promotions and performance reviews tied to those lies. And then, day in and day out, having to analyze the anatomy of those lies like a reluctant medical student with a weak stomach having to study the wriggly, gooey insides of a belly.

But now I admit I was wrong.

First, lie-ferreting, as I call it, is the most secure job in the world, especially in these troubled days of instant layoffs – after all, our politicians will never ever stop lying, so this is one job that you can count on for ever. I mean, these lie-ferreters must be literally offering a prayer of thanks to our leaders every day for giving them each day their daily bread.

I hope there are lobbyists for this kind of thing too, you know, pressurizing our politicians to stick to what they do best and not wander off the beaten path and start speaking the truth. That pressure is what is needed to keep this profession going.

Speaking of truth, I wonder if we need that flimsy illusion anymore. Truth is rigid and inflexible. Our civilization has matured and advanced far beyond that. We have become tolerant and broadminded. Our morality is bendy and stretchy – we even grade those lies these days, from ‘just misleading’ to ‘outright lie’ and treat it like nothing more than an academic, multiple-choice exam. Maybe it’s time to color code these lies and develop common standards and a great international data warehouse.

Our leaders are becoming prolific in their lies and adept at wrapping them up in layers and shades of subtle nuance. So much so that it is not anymore humanly possible to analyze such vast amounts and types of lies manually. They’ll have to use super computers and develop the world’s best artificial intelligence software. Every word spoken by a politician will need to go right from his mouth into a software program that will automatically dig out the source in real-time. Imagine the employment generation potential.

I am sure the software guys realize the potential – the sooner they make this an open platform kind of thing the better for them. Imagine the advantage of comparing the lies of leaders from different countries and cultures and automatically learning from all that. American leaders have fallen way behind some lesser countries, like my own for instance. I think you guys mistakenly outsourced that skill too. No wonder your leadership of the world has taken a hit. The last eight years were a good attempt but much more has to be done.

I strongly recommend that the lobbyists petition the Congress and elevate the lie-ferreting profession to an industry. We were careless about our truthful politicians and drove them to extinction. Let’s not allow that to happen to the lying ones. Who knows, after some time, this may be the only profession we are left with. Never fear, between the lies that our politician’s spout and our lobbyists, ferreting lies can keep all of us employed forever.

Next, lying must be made a mandatory qualification for any politician. Not lying is not an option. And we must re-elect only the ones who tell, not just the most outrageous lies, but the most twisted, warped ones. How would you sustain an industry for lies if the raw material were not of industrial strength?

Then, once in a century or so, a politician will come along, like a tsunami of truth, who will speak that and nothing but. That would be like the current financial catastrophe. Oh my God! that’ll have the jobless pounding the streets. Then we’ll need a sellout, er, a bailout just like the one today – we’ll have to find 700 billion lying politicians to offset the truth unleashed by that single politician. That, fortunately, should not be as difficult to do since we have been working on that quite some time now.

So, next time you hear one of our candidates say that they will create jobs, don’t think they are lying. They are already doing just that.