Ipso: All marketers are liars. Facto: We're all marketers.

"Take stock of those around you and you will... hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."- Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Thanks to Jon Strande for the above quote. As for the headline above it, well, that's my fault; just part of the ongoing crusade for some semblance of actionable non-bullshit (a/k/a Truth. One each: Unvarnished) vis a vis marketing and business stuff. Why? Ever heard the phrase "Promotions for the guilty and pink slips for the innocent"? If not, you have now. It's a concept that matters because so often we all find ourselves having to untangle cats cradles of rationalization and cheese-hiding just so we can deliver a product we're reasonably sure won't blow up in a client's face. Which means in our face. Reasonably sure. Maybe. Depends.

Yes, quality information is handy. It does things like push response rates and compliance higher. It stops us talking to ourselves to make ourselves feel good. It helps with that face thing too. (Self. Saving face. Interesting concepts and more on that later.)

Below, Michael Kinsley does a little empirical economics while plumbing the depths of self-talk. He has lots of juicy numbers, from this White House, no less. They say that--well, if one were a Republican one might not like what the 2005 Economic Report of the President says. And so, maybe a hypothetical Republican might say "impossible." Or that statistics lie. Or that there are other, external causes for economic trends. Or that Congress is the problem.

Or that Judges are.

She might say whatever she needs to say to continue believing that Democrats just HAVE t o be bad managers, terrible Presidents and people of poor character. They just have to be. Don't they? Sure they do. They don't get me. They don't get US. They don't get IT. They are just wrong. Why? Because. Just because. Because they have to be bad for me to be good.

Yeah, I don't buy that any grown-up could really delude themselves into believing that either.

Okay, I lied. I do believe they could. And do. Remember the saying "perception is reality"? When Immanuel Kant inferred it, he didn't mean that perception replaces truth but, rather, that we believe what we want to believe; and that belief, not fact, moves us. In other words, we lie to ourselves, often subconsiously, because it feels better than the truth. And lies often have happier endings. In that dimension, we actually say the perfect witty thing at just the right moment, rather than thinking of it in the car on the drive home. We get to be the hero. And our heroes remain unsullied; our faith in them, and the wisdom of our choice in them stays pristine and unchallenged. Makes me remember another saying, and it's possible reason for being: Reality's only a bitch because she always makes us clean up our room. And do our math. And show our work.

Yeah, come to think of it, this dimension is a real buzzkill.

Take it away Kinsley...

Washington Post

It was the TV talker Chris Matthews, I believe, who first labeled Democrats and Republicans the "Mommy Party" and the "Daddy Party." Archaic as these stereotypes may be, they do capture general attitudes about the two parties. But we live in the age of the one-parent family, and it is Mom more often than Dad who must play both roles.

It has not escaped notice that the Daddy Party has been fiscally misbehaving. But it hasn't really sunk in how completely Republicans have abandoned allegedly Republican values -- if in fact they ever really had such values.

Our text today is the statistical tables of the 2005 Economic Report of the President. I did this exercise a while back with the 2004 tables and couldn't quite believe the results. But the 2005 data confirm it: The party with the best record of serving Republican economic values is the Democrats. It isn't even close.

The Republican values I refer to are universal. We all want prosperity, oppose unemployment, dislike inflation, don't enjoy paying taxes, etc. These values are Republican only in the sense that Republicans are supposed to treasure them more and to be more reluctant to sacrifice them for other goals such as equality and clean air. [Some interesting numbers]

PS: I know Kinsley's a wackjob centrist and prone to hyperbole (unlike this writer, of course), so I wanted to be fair and balanced. Here's the Wall Street Journal saying the exact same thing a year ago January. But they still don't trust Democrats to run or grow the economy. Just wouldn't jibe with their dimensional reality.