Once’t upon a time back in that great long ago,..

 I spent some months as the re-write guy in a small, satellite office of a military newspaper. I had never studied ‘journalism’ or, for that matter, never even worked on so much as a high school newspaper…(well, I had contributed some cartoons but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count)…

The USAF in their infinite bureaucratic wisdom had trained me to be a court stenographer at the same time they were phasing out court stenographers and replacing them with the much more accurate recorders, but that’s another story as M’sieu Moustache so ably phrased it from behind his bar in the movie Irma La Douce...

The Officer in charge, a Captain as I recall, in that little office had studied journalism in whatever State College he’d attended and he gave me ‘The Guideline’ to follow in making sense out of the garbled notes that our ‘reporter’ and our‘photographer’ turned over to me…I was responsible, not only for writing the story but also writing the captions for the photos…

I'm not saying I was good at my job (don't think that was ever entered in the equation) but I was the only one doing it and no one actually corrected anything I wrote before I sent it off to the Mother Ship…(when it appeared in print, if it appeared in print, it was pretty much the way I’d written it)...

According to the Captains Guideline, the first rule of journalism therefore is to answer the questions: What (happened) Where (it happened) When (it happened) and How (it happened) whatever ‘it’ actually was…and don’t dare use an adjective or an adverb and keep it concise and pithy...

The second rule of journalism is that readers have short memories,which is a really good thing for newspapers…sort’a like weather forecasters…or voters...

And speaking of voters since it is 'The Political Season' and since I’ve spoken with so many Democrats that claim they may have voted for Obama the first time around but they didn’t vote for him the second time, absolutely not,no way, didn’t happen…It's very puzzling how he got elected the second time when so many people didn’t vote for him…Chicago-style politics, I suppose...  

Many of the Democrats I spoke with insisted they sat the last election out and probably will sit the next one out as well because the Democrats haven’t given them anyone to vote for and the Republican slate is just too confusing and besides, they can’t bring themselves to vote for another Bush because the previous Bush lied to them about Iraq…

If you then happen to mention that Hillary lied about Benghazi, they insist that has not been proven, even going so far as to deny that she confessed to lying when she was being interviewed by the Benghazi Committee even though if any of them had bothered to watch, they could have seen and heard for themselves that she did indeed confess...

Of course, that would have taken time out of their busy day(s)…

I, on that proverbial other hand, watched a great deal of her testimony…what was especially interesting was when she testified that she sent an e-mail to her daughter the night of the ‘disturbance’ where she called it a terrorist attack by Al Quaida…she also testified that she told the Egyptians that it was a terrorist attack…it was only in the aftermath, possibly after a conversation (unasked, unanswered 'n unproven) with Obama campaign advisors when she discovered that it was really, actually, the fault of a video that no one ever saw…

C’mon people, she lied!  Obama lied. Susan Rice lied and was rewarded for her lying by being promoted to the Ambassador to the United Nations,,,

“And now is the winter of our discontent…”

I suspect, in the end and after all is said and done,that darn near everyone cheats at some point in their lives so, if Hillary lies and cheats her way through her life, it must have been okay for George Bush to lie us into a war in Iraq…except Democrats tend to take umbrage at that because it ‘isn’t the same thing at all!” 

Well,of course it isn’t the same thing at all…if the Democrats could have proven that Bush or Cheny lied about the intelligence that sent us into Iraq, they would have called for impeachment and they would have been right to do so…

Anyhow,while everyone lies or cheats at some point in their life, I believe it usually occurs in childhood…children are marvelous liars…most of us grow up and, not wanting to be lied to ourselves, we are as a general rule, mostly honest because, frankly, the truth is much easier to remember than a lie because…well, because it’s the truth!

And you don’t need the adjectives and adverbs…