It occurs to me that in Washington, D.C., people may be playing the lie-teller game in their heads, too. (Photo by Raul654)

Years ago, I knew a young waitress who worked at the Howard Street IHOP. She had two kids, big plastic hearing aids tucked behind each ear, and a form that, from the waist up, looked a lot like my cousin Ira.

I would have followed her to the ends of the Earth if that was where she wanted to go.

She said very cute things in her Kentucky accent. When I would compliment her, she’d giggle and say, “You lie-teller, you.”

It didn’t work out between us. A couple of years after she got to wherever she went, I met another woman. This lady hailed from Auburn Gresham on Chicago’s South Side, which seemed only slightly to the north of where the waitress came from. She was even more fun to talk with.

The waitress’ best line survived in our marriage. When my wife and I would catch each other in a minor falsehood, we would exclaim, with a toothy grin, “You lie-teller, you.”

If there was a denial, there would be an escalation. “You are a lie-teller from the City of Lies.” Then, “Am not! You, my friend, are a lie-teller from The Great State of Liars.”

And on and on. “You are a lie-teller from the Land of Lies! From the Sovereign Nation of Lies! From the Planet of the Lies! From the Universe of Lies!”

We would have a very fine time with this activity, perhaps because we didn’t have good Wi-Fi.

It was so much fun, sometimes we would insert places we just liked the names of. “You are a lie-teller from the Upper Peninsula of Lies! Uff-da!”

“No, you are the lie-teller — from the Northern Lights of Lies!”

My wife went to the Great Land of Lies in the Sky several years ago, but our daughter has helped me keep the practice alive in our home. I hope she has farmed it out, telling her friends, perhaps, “You are a lie-teller from the High School of Lies!”

I still use the lie-teller game with people I’m close to, because it takes the edge off informing someone that you don’t believe what they just said.

Sometimes, with people who wouldn’t understand, I just do it in my head, and it makes me smile. The fibber stands there wondering what’s so darned funny, and that’s fine with me. By then I’ve already forgiven them for stretching the truth, and I didn’t have to make a big deal out of it.

It occurs to me that in Washington, D.C., people may be playing the lie-teller game in their heads, too. Some congress-creatures listen to spectacular whoppers and don’t say anything about them.

You see them with similar private grins that I have, when someone tells me something to the effect, “You know, I was in the third row when Ozzie Osbourne bit the head off that squirrel. No, bat. Yeah, that’s what it was. A bat.”

But the politicians are smiling at things that are on a different level. In comparison, they might be smiling while someone is saying, “I can control animals with my mind. That’s why I’ve brought six lions to Pennsylvania Avenue, and I’m going to instruct them to pick up all the trash in a three-mile radius, and come right back to me. Watch this!”

You can’t just grin at pronouncements like that. You have to take control of the situation. Either that or hire some really good lion-tamers who will do it for you.

But that’s exactly what is happening, metaphorically speaking. There are lions walking all over our country.

They are tearing up our soybean harvests. They are purring and rubbing against the legs of the people who hired the people that the Justice Department just indicted for messing with us. They are picking up little kids by the scruffs of their necks and putting them in the cages where they, the lions, should more reasonably be living.

And, being lions, they aren’t writing down the names of the kids’ parents so people know what to do with them when cage-time is over.

The politicians are just relieved that they’re ripping up the soybeans and caging the children, and not the other way ’round.

But the problem with letting big scary cats walk all over your country is kind of similar to letting big scary falsehoods just hang in the air unanswered. Both of them tend to breed, and when they do, they won’t just be fouling things up for soybean farmers and nameless immigrants.

The lyin’ lions will be the kings of the jungle.