Politics – and chiefly its practitioners – tend to cheapen certain words and even occasionally values.

Take the word “friend,” for example.

How many times has one heard the word “friend” used to describe a congressional colleague when the person who tosses the word out likely cannot stand the sight of the person who he or she has just described.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., may have done it the other day in talking about Republican colleague Ted Cruz of Texas.

http://thehill.com/video/senate/298051-reid-calls-cruz-a-schoolyard-bully

The use of that word in such a seemingly cavalier fashion bugs the daylights out of me.

I don’t know either of these two men, although I’ve read enough about them over the years to know plenty about them. Maybe they’re best pals, but I rather doubt it. Reid tossed the “friend” label at Cruz while saying on the Senate floor that the freshman Texas senator acts like a “schoolyard bully” on budget matters.

Over my more than six decades on this Earth, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I can call “friend.” I have been careful for many years not to use the word to describe individuals with whom I have friendly relationships but who don’t qualify as “friend.”

How do I describe a friend? He or she is someone – other than a spouse of a member of your immediate family – to whom you can say anything. These are individuals who you love unconditionally and who are there for you through thick and thin. Two of the individuals on my short list of friends go back with me a very long time; one of them goes back to the seventh grade.

So when I hear the word “friend” thrown around the way Harry Reid did on the Senate floor, I just shrug and maybe chuckle to myself. He’s not telling the truth.  He has cheapened a once-valuable word.