A short time after my colleague Steve Soukup and I were fired from Prudential Securities, just a few weeks before the presidential election in November 2000, we started our own shop and called it, of all things, The Political Forum.

Steve wrote a weekly newsletter, like the one he had been writing for Prudential under the title “Politics, Etc.,” and I wrote a weekly column, similar to the one I wrote for 17 years at Prudential. We called his newsletter “Copybook Headings,” after Kipling’s great poem by that name about the importance of immutable truths. My column appeared under the rather clumsy title “The Anti-Fabulists Corner,” in honor of Kipling’s wonderful poem “The Fabulists,” the word fabulist being defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as “an inventor or teller of falsehoods; a liar.”

We published nine issues of each before abandoning the effort and joining Lehman Brothers’ Washington Research shop, where Steve is still employed today. Happy to be out of reach of the censors, we wrote some good stuff during those exciting early weeks of the new Bush administration, if I do say so myself. And we had a great time, always trying to honor the thoughts behind Kipling’s poetic tributes to truth, whose titles we had borrowed.

So this week, I offer “The Fabulists,” a long-time favorite poem of mine from the great Tory poet, novelist, short-story writer, and Nobelist, (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling. My understanding is that this poem was written shortly before World War I, a time when Kipling’s literary work, as well as his energetic patriotism and conservative values, fell from public favor. But, like truth itself, Kipling, his work and his philosophy have endured long after his critics have been forgotten. We’ll visit his work again in these pages.