or "she's a politician" as a "probably on the rag" variant. If it's being read that way, it's being read wrong.

I use the "is a politician" construction to underscore the subject's CHOSEN PROFESSION, and the need to not merely recognize it but overcome it.

We've come a long way (all downhill imho) since St. Ronnie of the Raygun was first elected, politically, outside his union. He was an actor. He wasn't a "movie star," except in the sense that Christina Aguilera is a music star -- it's secondary, if not just an adjunct, to the 'celebrity' role that's central to the character. Not even as good as Kurt Russell's is the Reagan filmography; "bedtime for Bonzo" was a cliche during not merely both his terms but his race (against Gerald Ford) for the nomination in '76.

Reagan started his electioneering in a SAG race, remember? But then something went waytoowrong under that patent-leather hair, and he became a McCarthyite and a "small government conservative".

He gave us the "model" still being used, 40-some-odd years later (CA Gov. '66, yes?) for "success" in "leadership": spitshine bullfeathers with a big smile and let somebody smarter twist the meanings of your vague mouthings to suit the moment's exigencies (mostly it's been Cheney, since the Nixon years).

He derided poor people. He glamorized greed. He demonized "otherness". (Those things go way back with Reagan, btw. Ask his kids.) He lied (knowingly or not) about his own biography -- claiming he was a WW2 combat vet, when his "service" was in newsreel narrations, training films and PR. He was the slickest thing to hit the GOP since Tricky Dick in '60, and he brought a faux glamor to the party of do-nothing, all the while filling the Oval Office chair with a lack of conscience and consciousness unprecedented -- the perfect forerunner to w.

But Reagan had politicians in his corner, propping up his performance whenever it looked as if he might falter (and most if not all of them had GOP roots dating to Nixon and before).

Unlike lawyers, politicians don't have a bar association; their ethics are as fluid, at least, as those of the wheeler-dealer "settlement specialists" whose services to their clients are far more often disservice in the name of convenience (especially in a "tort reform" climate) than actual litigation in pursuit of justice. So yes, saying that so-and-so is a politician is a way of, in short, pointing out that you cannot take for granted that anything said will ever be adhered to, that anything offered will ever materialize, that you can afford the faith to trust even such easily-verified statements as the current state of precipitation in the vicinity from a politician. It's "of course they're not accountable, unless we make them be," in five syllables.

It applies to every single President ever elected -- look hard enough and you'll find dirty dealings and underhanded stunts, at least in the eyes of their political opponents, all the way back to the Constitutional Convention. It applies to every single Congressional officeholder ever, too; the PROFESSION is the problem, because it creates, or somehow inherently causes a mutation into, "politics" instead of "public service" -- sometimes among such ostensibly non-political entities as an elementary-school faculty, but always, always, always among those who run for office they have to pay to campaign for.