We need this guy today. To fit us with clear lenses.

He appeared years ago. When I sold my car, I ran an ad in the classifieds. It extolled the car’s virtues to no end. Described it as a dream of a vehicle — virtually unblemished. Perfection.

He brought me down to earth. “Hey, mate. Your car’s eight years old. It’s got 120,000 miles. Stop pretending you’re The Great Pretender. Car’s worth this much. Take it or leave it.” I took it.

Pretending is a national pastime with us. Don’t pretend otherwise. For instance, lately we have been asked to pretend our spies don’t lie. The heads of our intelligence agencies have all been caught lying to Congress and the public — over the Clinton email mess and over the various Trump messes.

FBI Director Comey lied about his leaking of his memos. He pretended his leak was not a leak. That is pretty dumb. But it is beside the point. The point is that he lied.

We are supposed to be outraged — over the fact that these birds all lied about these things. Outraged? Who are we kidding? We hired them to lie. 

Decades ago, a major CIA spook was caught lying to Congress. His defense was simple. He took an oath to protect CIA secrets. For the good of the nation. He could break his oath or lie to Congress. He chose to lie. (What would you do? Congress could embarrass him, but the CIA could rub him out.)

This is the first question on a job application to head up a spy agency: Do you know how to lie? Let us not lie about this or pretend. To be a spy, you must lie. If you don’t know how to lie, apply for another job. Don’t apply for Lois Lerner’s job at the IRS. Don’t apply at the Veterans Administration. And forget about being a politician. Your best chance is with the Boy Scouts. Trust me. Would I lie?

We are asked to pretend the guys who play big-time college sports are amateurs and also serious students. That takes a lot of pretending. When many of them cannot spell the name of their college, it does.

We were asked to pretend the Iran nuclear agreement was working. It clearly was not. We granted Iranians many billions to behave. We were supposed to pretend they were not using the billions we granted them to fund terrorism. They were. 

We were supposed to pretend Iran is just kidding about destroying Israel. Pretend the missiles it mounted in Syria, near Israel, were just there for show. 

We are supposed to pretend this was a treaty. No one dared to bring it to Congress. It was not a treaty. It was a gentlemen’s agreement. Pretend, pretend.

We are asked to pretend that taxes and regulations do not affect behavior. Millions of people have moved from high-tax states to low-tax states. Thousands of businesses have too. They must have moved for other reasons. Could not possibly be taxes that inspired them to move. Pretend.

We are supposed to pretend that building a wall on our border will serve no purpose. It will not stop illegals from pouring into the U.S. Pretend, pretend. Why on earth would Mexico protest so strongly? Why? Because they fear graffiti on it? Because it will block Mexicans views? Come on, there can be only one reason. But let us pretend that is not the reason.

The truth is that Mexico’s economy depends upon money that illegals send back from the U.S. Their money props up the Mexican economy. Period. We are asked to pretend otherwise.

Lastly, we are asked to pretend money does not buy politicians. Companies and special interests don’t bribe, influence, pressure pols one way or another with moolah.

If you pretend such, do I ever have a car for you. 

From Tom…as in Morgan.         

Tom Morgan writes about political, financial, and other subjects from his home near Oneonta. You can write to Tom at tomasinmorgan@yahoo.com. You can read more of his writing at tomasinmorgan.com

I was chatting with a group of students the other day when one of them looked me in the eye and commented, “You’re very tough on journalists.” I had to plead guilty.

 Of course, I’m tough on journalists. Maybe even as tough on them as they are on politicians.

 Our representative democracy depends on journalists doing their jobs. Why? Because it’s essential that citizens get the solid, accurate, and fair information they need to make good judgments about politicians and policy decisions.

 Which is why, if you value representative democracy, you have to be deeply concerned about the once-over-lightly journalism that fills our media. Too often, reporters, commentators and online contributors focus on trivia, partisan posturing, and political gamesmanship, and not on the substance of issues.

 Yet the world we live in is so complicated and so difficult to understand that the need is greater than ever for journalists to pick out what really matters in their communities or in the nation and convey solid information to the citizen.

 The prevalence of fake news and misinformation makes this search for objective truth ever more difficult and challenging. If we don’t have the right information as citizens, then we don’t have the facts to shape our opinions — and we’re going to be in trouble as a nation.

 Disentangling truth and untruth from the citizen’s standpoint is really hard. Especially because some of the institutions we once relied upon for independent, objective information — I’m thinking specifically of Congress here — have increasingly stopped serving as models for the search for truth.

 Sorting through all the information at our fingertips, distilling meaning from it, zeroing in on what’s really important — that’s work that both journalists and ordinary citizens have to undertake. And it’s essential to making our government work. Journalists have to ask themselves whether they are getting to the bottom of stories and giving enough information to citizens, so they can make good judgments — or are they too focused on trivia, entertainment, and posturing? And citizens — whose media tastes drive so much of what the media provide — need to be focused on what matters.

 It’s a complicated dance, but in the end, it comes down to one thing: journalists need to provide, and citizens need to ask for, the reporting that’s necessary to make the country work.       

Lee Hamilton is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, representing a district in south central Indiana.