Over the Christmas holidays, I watched more than the annual required dose of Fox News with a close relative (his house, his TV, his rules) and heard Bill O’Reilly congratulate Mitt Romney for his family’s positive history in civil rights. Just an hour ago, I discussed this with a colleague saying, “Romney’s dad was the governer of Michigan during the 1967 Detroit riots, when tanks and soldiers were deployed by LBJ and black Americans were treated very poorly up until and during these riots. While he was a moderate Republican, it is really hard for me to imagine Papa Romney marching with MLK.” (Side note: the essay on the riots mentions “lack of affordable housing” as one of its instigators, besides routine and often unnecessary police harassment.)
It turns out that George Wilcken Romney never marched with Dr. King (via First Draft via Lower Manhattanite).
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he watched his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, in a 1960s civil rights march in Michigan with Martin Luther King Jr.
On Wednesday, Romney“s campaign said his recollections of watching his father, an ardent civil rights supporter, march with King were meant to be figurative.
He was speaking figuratively, not literally, Eric Fehrnstrom, spokesman for the Romney campaign, said of the candidate.
Nice try, silly Democrats, but don’t you know that only your candidates may be raked over the coals for lying? A Mitt supporter on a Fox News blog post on this topic already says, “I don’t know why the media is attacking Romney over semantics. Romney has the business experience to save this country from economic disaster.” So, an untruth is now semantics. Witness the glory of doublespeak come home to roost. I bet this lie doesn’t ding Romney in the polls one bit.
