Last week, in a generally congenial if somewhat heated discussion on Facebook, the person I was jousting with said—after I’d pointed out just a few of the inconsistences and the general lack of substance in Donald Trump’s utterances—“I don’t care what he says as long as he gets the job done.”

Since, in my opinion, the Donald approaches complex major issues much the same way the Big Bad Wolf approached the last of the Three Pigs’ houses (the brick one), I don’t believe he can get the job done. But since neither I nor my on-line adversary can see far into the future, I won’t say that he can’t. However, I do believe in character and truth—neither of which the Donald seems to have much of an acquaintance with.

But that does not appear to be the biggest problem. It seems that somewhere along the way respect for truth has seeped completely out of public discourse. And the biggest problem is that nobody seems to care.

Nobody seems to want to hold those who publish hateful memes accountable, no matter whom they are skewering. Some people just accept them, and some even forward them on, so that they can continue to provide ammunition for already-formed opinions.

Another post noted that it was “just politics,” as it that were a legitimate excuse for spreading lies.

(Note that I said “legitimate excuse.” It’s been a tradition in politics dating back to the early days, but unless my mother was totally wrong, expediency is not an excuse for lying.)

In my opinion, lying is not just morally wrong; it’s also a sign of real weakness, a sign that the liar isn’t either willing or able to run a successful campaign based on truth.  Usually if you want to take out a candidate, you could do it simply by telling the truth.  (As somebody once said—Adlai Stevenson, William Randolph Hearst, or Chauncey Depew—“If they’ll stop lying about me, I will stop telling the truth about them.)

Over the years I’ve worked on 18 political campaigns. In half of them my candidate won, and in eight of the other nine, we lost in the runoff. Of the candidates I worked for, there were two that I would have actually voted for. I was a hired gun. But I didn’t need to lie.

We did our research, and we told the truth that we wanted the voters to know. It wasn’t necessarily the whole truth; probably no candidate is all bad. But it was the truth.

And we found that the truth can win campaigns.

The starkest example of this (and the only one that still sometimes troubles my conscience) was a campaign my partner and I did in the 1980s. A very well-funded group of business people wanted the chairman of the County Commissioners taken out in the primary. My partner had done some work for them in the past; so they called us. We asked to meet their candidate, and they said they’d send him right over.

When the candidate showed up, he was wearing a pinstriped suite with lapels that extended beyond his shoulders, a floral tie, and motorcycle boots. When we quizzed him on the issues he’d probably be facing, it became obvious that he’d managed to live all of his life in the county and learn nothing about it. On top of that, everything he said, including “Hello,” came out as a high-pitched whine. We talked for about an hour, and my partner told the candidate we’d call his backers. The candidate left, and my partner made the call. The side that I heard went like this:

Partner: Well, you wanted us to turn your frog into a prince. We can’t even make a pretty frog out of this one.

Partner: Uh-huh.

Partner: Okay. Just back the money truck up to the door.

He hung up and told me we had a new client.

At this point this rant could be about the lack of ethics among political consultants, the influence of money on campaigns, or the advantages of a benevolent monarchy over a democracy. But it’s about truth.

We had a candidate that, so far as we could tell, nobody in their right mind should vote for. We had a group of clients that wanted him to win the primary (and didn’t really care who won the general election). And we’d accepted the campaign.

Since we knew we couldn’t get our candidate elected, we determined to get the incumbent unelected. We knew that most politicians weren’t completely clean, even though this one seemed like a nice enough guy. It didn’t take a lot of digging to find enough ugly truth to build a media campaign on. We recorded one line of audio from our candidate (Paid for by the (insert candidate name and office here) campaign, and we told him to go home and not come out again until after the primary.

It was a nasty, negative campaign. And everything in it was true, verifiable and damning. Of course, it didn’t begin to tell the whole story of the incumbent’s administration, but that was his job, and one he didn’t do very well.

We won the primary. The funders dropped out, giving us no reason to continue. And our ex-client got trounced in the general election. A couple of weeks later our ex-client was arrested.

So I don’t just have a moral problem with politicians who lie in their campaigns; I have a professional disdain for them. They just not willing to do their homework. Unfortunately, in this season’s political campaigns, anybody can point to any candidate and find some untruths. However, the Donald seems to be the admitted king of them all. He’s gotten more exercise walking back campaign statements than Lewis and Clark did walking across the continent. He has been on two, three, or four sides of almost all of the major issues, and he seems to think he wears the Cloak of Invincibility. (“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?)

In fact, whenever the Donald’s statements go beyond name calling and ad hominem arguments and actually include something purporting to be a fact, the fact checkers usually find it isn’t. He may well hold the record for “Pants on Fire” ratings from Politifact.

As I see it, we have a couple of options. We can either start holding all sides accountable, realizing that believing a lie that’s conforms to our particular prejudices isn’t really a solution to the problem. Or we can at least have a wake and give respect for the truth a proper sendoff.

I’d vote for the former.