How do you know when someone is a phony?

I've been re-thinking what I said in my November 30 post about novelists who write about hilarious, but pathetic, characters. Maybe the best way for people to get to know someone is to "live" with the character in a book and draw our own conclusions about the character.

How do we know, for example, which, if any, of the presidential candidates can be trusted to be who they say they are? Barack Obama said he was going to be a uniter, but he clearly is a divider. Today the above-the-fold story on the front page of the Denver Post is about a highly respected retired sheriff of one of metro Denver's biggest suburban counties. He is currently in a jail (named after him) on charges of trading meth for sex with a man. The retired sheriff was voted National Sheriff of the Year a few years ago with a reputation as a crusader against illegal drugs!

How can you detect when a man or woman is a con artist? One sure-fire sign: the person consistently portrays himself as a victim, or gets surrogates to do it for him. Remember Hillary Clinton, who blamed "a right wing conspiracy" for reports about her husband's infidelity? Of course, when you portray yourself as a victim, you have to point the finger at someone else. If you are a con artist, you can get lots of people to believe you and feel sorry for you, and if you have the media in your pocket, like Barack Obama has from the moment he announced his candidacy for his first run at the presidency, your efforts to put the blame somewhere else becomes all that much easier.

Another thing that helps: be a smooth talker. Come up with an idea that sounds fresh, like "9-9-9." The actual substance of your idea may not matter, as long as you are persuasive in keeping the idea front and center. Or, if you are Barack Obama, you can rail against "fat cats" on Wall Street, and secretly give them taxpayers' money to hide how dismally they have been running their banks; then, you can collect hundreds of millions of dollars from those same fat cats for your campaign. All the while you can rest assured that no one in the media will call you out on your hypocrisy.

Another attribute of a con artist is that they convince themselves that they are not responsible for the consequences of their decisions and actions, when those decisions and actions fail to produce beneficial results. Because the con artist sees himself being pure as the driven snow (and we have plenty of that here in Colorado right now), anything that goes wrong cannot be his fault; it is always the fault of someone else.