That's what one of the alleged eyewitnesses to George Romney marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, when told that Dr. King could not possibly have been at that 1963 march in Grosse Pointe, MI, because he was in New Jersey at the time.
[Insert your own snide comment. Reference material for your comment is available here.]
Anyway, the WaPo's fact-checker has conferred upon Romney its coveted four-Pinocchio award for telling a genuine whopper in the course of the presidential campaign.
The scale, for those unfamiliar with the WaPo's scientific rating system, runs from one Pinocchio (“Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.”) through two (“Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily.”), and three (“Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”), to a maximum of four (“Whoppers.”). No mention of how many “Whoppers” have been awarded thus far in the campaign season.
Here's the fact-checker's overall assessment:
Memory can play tricks on people after 45 years. In this case, the documentary evidence of contemporaneous newspaper reports carries much greater weight than the recollections of elderly “eyewitnesses.” Mitt Romney now says he was speaking “figuratively” when he said he “saw” his father march with Martin Luther King. It now seems that George Romney only “marched” with King in the figurative sense. The burden of historical proof to demonstrate otherwise now clearly rests with the Romney campaign.
Why didn’t Mitt just say, “You know what? I don’t remember exactly, I thought he had, but I guess not. But that’s all besides the point. The point was that my father was a civil rights Republican, and he passed on the values of equality for all to me.” Isn’t that just a whole lot easier than trying to parse the word “saw”?
either of admitting that he made a mistake, or of admitting that his father — despite his admirable civil rights record — never happened to march with Dr. King when other people did. More here.
The commentson David’s latest Talking Politics post are depressing. A couple of them cite an anti-Bernstein [rant http://occidentalvalues.blogsp… from the Occidental Values blog as “proof” that George did march. Many accuse him of smearing a great American (George!). Others just call him an anti-Mormon bigot.
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p>Most puzzlingly, there’s this: He was cleary marching in support of MLK so to say he was “marching with him” is completely accurate unless of course you try to twist it to mean literally.
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p>Either the Romney spin machine has run amok or people just aren’t paying attention. David’s piece is well researched and thoughtful. To interpret as a smear campaign against George is just bizarre.
I would think the Barak.Clinton horse race would be far more interesting.
I just wanted to note that the witnesses may well have believed their false memories. It’s more common than you might think.
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p>Romney on the other hand….
probably really did think they saw what they say they saw. And there are lots of possible explanations for that. But the historical evidence is pretty compelling that their memories are incorrect.
He also was reported to have said on Meet The Press about the Mormon Church admitting African Americans, “I can remember when I heard about the change being made, I was driving home from, I think it was law school, but I was driving home – going through the Fresh Pond rotary in Cambridge, Mass. I heard it on the radio and I pulled over and literally wept.”
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p>I want to know where he was able to find space to pull over when he was going through the Fresh Pond Rotary.
I just laughed so hard, I cried. Well done!
…I sincerely wouldn’t care what Mitt had said about this if it was off the cuff on Russert’s show, or a similar show. But this was said at what was billed as a major speech, presumably the text of which had been in preparation for weeks. There is a significant difference between the venues, and what should have been a significant difference between the preparation.
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p>That is what makes this error so problemmatic.
…but for Sabutai’s sake I will
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p>To some whites, all Negroes look alike. Maybe they believed that George was marching with MLK.*
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p>If you wonder whether that is sarcasm, you need not wonder. You can be assured that it is.
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p>*On the other hand, I used to work with a very intelligent computer scientist, who will go unnamed. He told me a story in which, he was questioned (I don’t recall the context) about a particular (non-criminal) incident. He said that he was relating what he believed what was in his papers. When he subsequently went back to his papers, the information wasn’t there. People, even very intelligent people, can persuade themselves that something occurred, that something was transcribed, etc., without it being the case.
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p>What Romney should have done was to say that he misspoke. To err is human, to forgive is divine.