Honesty is the best policy. That’s the way the saying goes. Honesty is the best policy but lying pays better. Imagine a car salesman telling you that the 24,990 sticker price means you can buy it for 23,500. Imagine that and you can imagine flying to the moon. There’s exactly the same chance of it happening.

“These are organically grown tomatoes” the sign says. Organically grown? Unless they cloned them they’d have to be. What they want you to think is that they weren’t grown in a hothouse. Sure. It’s January and some truck farmer is picking tomatoes in a blizzard. They aren’t even red. They’re more of a light orange. You buy them anyway. They taste like...nothing. Well, the sign didn’t say they’d taste like a tomato.

“Look, the truth of the matter is”- here comes the lie. Everytime you hear that here comes the lie. The truth needs no introduction does it? It would be nice to just once hear, “The lie is”. Then you’d at least know the person is telling the truth. The truth won’t mean anything but then you’re getting a lie either way.

“I’ll make an honest woman of you”. Years ago that meant he’d marry you. Honest woman? What honest? You both did something but the woman was dishonest if she didn’t get married. Most of the time she’d be honest by telling the guy to take off.

Here’s some honesty you need to avoid. When a woman asks you if she looks good in this outfit the answer is yes. This isn’t considered a lie. It’s called survival. The man doesn’t dare tell the truth; the woman doesn’t want to hear the truth. Truth isn’t a part of this equation at all.

“I love you more than anything in the whole, wide world”. If a woman says that it means just that. It’s the truth. If a man says that it means, “I love you more than any animate object”. He loves you more than the bimbo next door but he would like to get to know her better. He spends whatever it takes on the truck but why do you need to get a new dress? The old one still fits.

Kids lie all the time. “I didn’t do that”. Well, only the kid and mom and dad are here and mom and dad didn’t do it. The kid swears he didn’t do it. To a child lying to an adult isn’t really lying. It doesn’t count.

“I don’t do drugs”. This is a tricky one. Yes, it’s a lie but not a total lie. Drugs are really doing you. This is one statement that is a truth and a lie at the same time. The addict doesn’t care one way or the other as long as he gets his drug of choice. He has left the truth behind a long time ago.

We have all kinds of lying now. There’s fibs, white lies and situational truths and inoperative truths. There’s truth based on the facts I present, leaving out the facts that don’t support my statement. There’s political lying which doesn’t count. There’s professional lying, also called advertising. It doesn’t count either.