In the light of strict morality, a lie is a lie, so any attempt at comparative analysis of lying would necessarily be a total waste of time.

But here, Richard Fernandez invites us to dip a toe in the waters of relative morality, a supremely sophisticated discipline in which lies could be measured on some more-or-less continuous malfeasance scale, so they would be amenable to comparative analysis. For instance, the word of the plain-vanilla honest man would always register at zero on such an adequate scale, and falsehoods of various degrees of malevolence would be recognized by numbers of proportional magnitude.

One could even conceive of a unit of measurement for this “rationalized dissemblance” (Copyrights, Guvinoff), which would not necessarily difficult to define, since the negative dollar might serve rather well, as follows: On that scale, the grand total of Bernie Madoff’s misrepresentations over his whole career would amount to 70 Giga units, because he ultimately caused $70,000,000,000 to be sunk into his private black hole of malicious gravity. Mathematically speaking, you might safely state that he would have conributed 70 billion of negative dollars to the common good, so the magnitude of his dissembling would be measured by the number 70,000,000,000, since the unit of malfeasance is the negative dollar.

This measurement would allow one to evaluate rationally the distance between honesty and politics (or other fields of dissembling), since well executed science requires rigourous respect for the facts (a.k.a. “honesty”) whereas well executed politics seems to require some virtuosity in the art of dissembling.

You could even visualize some kind of world championship where extraordinary athletes such Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and John Murtha, just to name three highly respected practitioners, may have a chance at the podium, and perhaps the competition should be held in Chicago, since Rio de Janeiro is already booked-up?

No wonder Sarah Palin is supposed to be a bumbling amateur!