Porcine Cosmetology

The other day I ran across a marvelous euphemism that I hadn't heard before: Porcine Cosmetology. It's the more genteel equivalent of the popular expression putting lipstick on a pig ... referring to the art of dressing up bad or unpleasant news in a more palatable form.

I think I'm in the wrong line of work: the real money nowadays is probably in Porcine Cosmetology. You'd never run out of bad news to spin, no matter where you live and work:

If you work for Congress, you could spend hours spinning out excuses why vital legislation (think health care, immigration reform, and the war in Iraq) never seems to go anywhere. Or you could explain why there's been no real action to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax (at least the House finally passed a half-assed measure this week...but the Senate will probably mess it up).

If you work for the Executive Branch, you could spend fruitful days figuring out ways to blame everyone else for your disastrous missteps.

If you work for the State Department, you could work for years coming up with good reasons why some Foreign Service Officers don't want to go to the places they're needed to do the jobs they signed up to do.

If you work for the Washington DC city government, you can spin the story of how a group of city employees scammed the city for more than $20 million over many years without being detected.

If you work for a major American corporation (General Motors, for instance), you could come up with good reasons why it's okay to lose $29 billion (yes, billion) dollars in a fiscal quarter. Or why it's a good idea to ship jobs overseas and lay off the workers who then can't buy your products because they don't have jobs.

Yep. I'm going for a degree in Porcine Cosmetology. There's no shortage of troughs from which to feed, and of gullible voters to let me get away with it.

I'll let you know how it works out.

Have a good day and a great weekend. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo