So, Mitt Romney never saw his father march with Martin Luther King, something Romney says is simply a matter of how one defines “saw”, “march”, “with”, and “Martin Luther King.” Most people take the words to mean what they seem to mean, while Romney argues that they are figurative, and easily deconstructed. Neither did Romney himself march with Martin Luther King, a claim he made in 1978 and which similarly hinges on the malleability of words, in this instance including the ones mentioned above and adding “Detroit”.

The threat to Romney arising from the relaxed discipline he exercises over the children of his tongue doesn’t so much hinge on whether or not he shares his father’s undeniable commitment to civil rights—lots of Republicans would view marching with King as a negative, if not quite a deal-breaker—but on the doubt it casts on other, more recent epiphanal moments, such as his defection from the pro-choice camp after he found, in the words of NPR’s Jason Beaubien, “stem-cell researchers casually cloning and farming embryos in Orwellian labs.”

Orwellian in this instance a reference to Brave New World, not Romney’s own linguistic legerdemain.

In other news, some Ron Paul supporters are apparently taking a story Tucker Carlson filed while traveling with Paul in Nevada as an attack on the iconoclastic GOP candidate, but it seemed to me about as positive as one could expect from a charter member of the establishment cynics wing of the party. It probably really wasn’t Carlson’s fault that he overslept and had to hitch a ride to a Paul press conference from a brothel-owner friend and a pair of hookers, and the story is actually pretty flattering to Paul, portraying a sincere, dedicated and somewhat bemused guy without dismissing his ideas out of hand.

If Paul could count on that sort of press for the next month or so, he really might win. As for Carlson, who is insufferable on television, the story sets him up to claim, if he wanted it, the conservative humorist’s throne long since abdicated by P.J. O’Rourke, who can be genuinely insightful and funny when he’s not being a total dick, and since pretended to by the likes of Ann Coulter, who has flawlessly mastered total dickery but continues to flounder on the other fronts. Tucker needs to stay on the road and away from the cameras.

UPDATE: As a reader mentioned in the comments on this post, several eyewitnesses to a march featuring King and George Romney were “discovered” by the “reporters” at Politico. Unfortunately, the witnesses, like Mitt himself, suffer from crippling figurativity.

Two women contacted the Mitt Romney campaign this week, offering their memories of seeing Romney’s father march with Martin Luther King Jr., in Grosse Point Michigan in 1963. Campaign officials were well aware that the women were mistaken. Yet, they directed those women to tell their stories to a Politico reporter. The motives and memories of the two women are unknown and irrelevant; the motives of the campaign, however, were obvious — to spread information they knew to be untrue, for the good of the candidate.

By getting this story out late on Friday afternoon, heading into the holiday weekend — good luck getting a King historian on the phone before Wednesday — the campaign was pretty well assured that it could keep alive through Christmas their claim that Mitt Romney was mistaken only about “seeing” it, not about it taking place.

In other words, what probably started out as a genuine case of a family legend, one of those stories which, true or not, gets repeated so often within your family that you accept it as true and can even remember it happening, has turned into a case of deliberate lying, and lying by proxy, on the part of the candidate and his campaign.

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