Time Traveler

Some clarity has been brought to the mystery of the R desire to take the country back several decades. Turns out, they're time travelers.

Mitt Romney might have been stretching the truth — and the space-time continuum — earlier this week while telling a Michigan crowd about his fond memories of attending the Golden Jubilee, the 50th anniversary celebration of the American automobile.

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The problem: the June 1, 1946, event took place a full nine months before Romney was born.

Well, I'm a generous guy: I'm sure it's not the first time a person recalled a story told to him as something he'd actually experienced. Hell, Ronald Reagan did it, too.

Like all the R candidates, of course, Romney has a special facility for lying; but his has a unique quality. Whereas Newt Gingrich lies with no effort at all, and with a force emanating from his self-importance that tells him words formed in his mouth become definitially true on passing his teeth; and whereas Rick Santorum lies like a preacher, transubstantiating falsehood into truth by the grace of god, Mitt Romney does it with a sheepish smirk, barely detectable, fleeting, like email in my inbox for which I've set up a filter, or like Kaiser Söze: there for a blink, and gone. Suppressed, with hidden effort, aborning.

As a kid, Mitt, I'd guess, was taught it was wrong to lie. Might not have got spanked, but couldn't wear his ascot to school when he got caught, or some other painful and reverberating consequence. So after he concluded that political expediency outweighs honor, when he decided he'd say anything that breezed his wetted finger to get himself elected president, when lying became a justifiable means to that end -- an end, by the way, for which he's never expressed a vision other than getting there -- it seems to have been easier to do than expunging the guilt. But only just.