How can you tell when a politician is lying?

[Fred Shapiro]

On Sun, 19 Mar 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

>    It's an old joke.  "Q: How can you tell when a politican is lying?  A: His
> lips are moving."
>    Incredibly, it's not in SAFIRE'S NEW POLITICAL DICTIONARY (that I could
> see).
>    I remember the line from before the ADS voted "Bushlips" as the Word of
> the Year.
>    I'll probably check Joey Adams's works on Monday, but does anyone have any
> clues?

Here's some better information I found since my last posting.  It's taken
from the definitive work on lawyer jokes, an unpublished manuscript by
Marc Galanter:

"I was surprised to discover that this is a rather recent addition to the
lawyer joke corpus, appearing in print first in 1986.  It derives from a
joke about husbands which has been around since at least the 1940s.
[Galanter cites here to Eddie Cantor, World's Book of Best Jokes (1943),
p. 171, and Frederick Meier, The Joke Tellers Joke Book (1944), p. 306.]
Although sometimes told about women, salespeople, senators, criminal
suspects, economists, politicians, and others, it has become
predominantly a lawyer joke -- at least in the United States."

Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2