Types of BS Artist

Bullshit is a useful skill, but there are a lot of people who abuse it, to the general detriment of all.

The Artist.  I knew a guy who reveled so much in his talent to BS that he seemed to make it a policy to never do anything else.  His office was across the aisle from mine and we got to be fairly good friends.  He was a very smart guy and showed enough comprehension that I believe he could have done useful work, but he chose not to.  I asked him about this and he of course gave me BS for an answer.  He had me snowed for more than a week when I first met him.  It took his boss several months to really grasp what was going on, and when his boss tried to use more force to get him to shape up, his boss stepped in.   The boss's boss was prone to referring to him as one of the biggest talents we have in this company.  I left the company about two years later and the boss's boss still thought the world of him.   He contacted me about ten years later and was working for a politician--an appropriate job for him--but I think he was too much of a rebel to go very far with this.  His memorial (he died of a cerebral hemorrhage a few years ago) was all full of wonderful praise for his generosity and wisdom.  Not the guy I knew.

The Embellisher.   I've known quite a few of these.  The best of them are pretty knowledgeable and can make a lot of useful contributions, but when their expertise runs to its limits, they keep going.  They can make educated guesses and the audience is no wiser.  Sometimes they're even right.  As long as it's only a tiny fraction of the point that they're making, it's actually valuable.  Rarely does the customer know as much as the embellisher, and the small embellishment is really more like a white lie than willful deception.  The most impressive embellisher I know is regarded by many as a great visionary.  He is not.  He's a small visionary and a hypester, and a stealer of other's ideas.   He could be a useful guy--he's very smart and knows a lot about a lot of things, but he's more interested in getting his ideas heard and implemented, good or bad, than he is in their actual usefulness. His present venture is a patent mill, which is an excellent fit, but among the most harmful things he could be doing.

Almost all Salesmen are embellishers, but they generally have too little knowledge to be useful.  They are generally unconcerned with the right answer, only with making the sale and not getting caught.

The Flack is a very special case.  The job is to make people think they're saying things that appeal to the widest possible audience; to seem like all things to all people, while never getting pinned down on anything even slightly controversial and never saying anything that might get them caught lying or give away strategy.  It takes a lot of skill to do well, and it's evidently very stressful, because the best of them seem only able to do the job for a few years.  E.g. presidential press secretary.

Many Hacks started out as flacks but discovered that their audience doesn't really care whether they're telling the truth or not.  Rush Limbaugh is almost the defining example of this.  In the late '80s, he said lots of controversial stuff that was appealing to right wingers, but was very careful to edge right up to the edge of the truth and not actually lie.  My favorite was when he pointed out that there's more old growth forest in the US today than when the Declaration of Independence was signed.   It's true.  There's more old growth in Alaska, all by itself, than in the original 13 colonies in 1776.  But his listeners were meant to think that the old growth had come back.  Some time during the GHW Bush administration, he realized that his listeners didn't care whether he was telling the truth or not, and were paying for controversy, not sense or reality, so he gave it up and became a hack.  Most hacks where never anything but hacks though.

The White Lie is an important piece of BS.  They're usually harmless and smooth social situations, but in bulk they can do a lot of harm.   Many obnoxious people have no idea they're being obnoxious.  A little truthtelling might give them a chance to figure it out.

addeda dec 2013
I think Paul Ryan started out thinking he was an embellisher who didn't initially realize that his whole world-view was based on a fantasy novel, that described people and behaviors which could only exist in a world of magic.  He became a full-on artist when he discovered that nobody on the political right even cared whether he was connected to reality or not, and succeeded in selling himself as a wise, competent man, when in fact he is an incompetent boob who can deliver nonsense speeches well.   Functionally, he is pure Hack.  The true artist I describe above did have some notion of ideas.