Drooliani: "Truth is what we say it is."

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

15. I wouldn't call political truth fungible so much as fluid.

Politics is mostly marketing, and politicians are always trying to sell us something, so their sales pitches will almost inevitably be less than 100% perfectly true. Any salesman will tell you how great his product is - and may considerably exaggerate its greatness - and will downplay or fail to mention the product's flaws. This is normal spin, but it becomes fraud if the pitch includes outright lies. Political truth usually contains enough spin to create its own gravitational field, but everybody understands that there's a difference between spin and perfect truth. We've learned to take our politicians, even the ones we like, with a grain of salt, so most of us listen to political sales pitches with some skepticism because we know they are not quite the truth.

What we need to know is when political truth - that is, a spun sales pitch that isn't actually false or fraudulent - is divorced from truth entirely. Political analysis has become epistemology.