Some years ago I had the dubious honor of sitting in on a negotiation meeting between my main client, and his telephone service providers. My client did the vast majority of affiliate recruiting via a telemarketing "boiler room", and the bundling of leased lines for combined data and voice service was becoming mainstream. Anyway, the part that's relevant to Eric Cantor: this business owner had engaged a negotiator to negotiate a price structure. The meeting concluded with the negotiator claiming some competitor price point that was, to put it simply, a bald lie. The telco salespeople called him on it, politely, and my client seemed very pleased with himself.

Maybe this is how business is done; I found it nauseating.

This is what Cantor does. He's the Republicans' pet "negotiator", which is a polite way of acknowledging he's a liar with a purpose. He finds that boundary between the debatable and the frivolous, pokes his toe over to see who's paying attention, makes that token effort to float absurdities just in case something extraordinary can be gotten-away-with.