Little White Lies. Outright Lies. Artful Lies.

Once a bartender told a sailor on leave for the weekend, There’re a lot of prostitutes down at the bus station. Say hello to Anna if you see her.

Listening you’d think Anna was a prostitute but you’d be wrong: She was the sixty year-old clerk working behind the Greyhound ticket counter.

It’s the devil’s own trick: A wizard of deception puts two facts – both true – side by side and creates a fiction. That’s an Artful Lie.

Here’s another example: The Carolina Partnership for Reform is a political bull-terrier that’s fond of two things: Phil Berger and Medicaid MCOs (Managed Care Organizations). Its magic trick works like this: In one breath it tells legislators ‘Medicaid has overspent its budget by $5 billion since 2009’ and in the next breath it tells them that ‘the Medicaid Monster is devouring the state budget and that’s why we can’t give teachers a pay raise’ – then it adds putting MCOs in charge of Medicaid is the cure.

Reading CPFR’s emails you’d believe state Medicaid spending has soared $5 billion but, again, you’d be wrong: The truth is since 2009 state Medicaid spending has dropped.

So how did Medicaid ‘overspend its budget’ while spending dropped?

Look at the first budget (for State Fiscal Year 2011-12) Republicans passed after they took control of the General Assembly: Phil Berger & Company budgeted $894.5 million less for state Medicaid than Medicaid actually spent the year before – which lead straight to a multi-million dollar budget shortfall. Even though actual state Medicaid spending didn’t increase a penny.

And CPFR almost surely knows that.

But, like the bartender, it also knows how to put two facts side by side and create a fiction.

Which is an unhappy portent for Phil Berger & Company.

Because CPFR’s artful emails are drawing a bulls-eye on the multi-million dollar hole in the first state Medicaid budget Berger & Company passed.