Mitt Romney is a liar

Will the establishment media ever tell the truth about Mitt Romney's trouble telling the truth?

They smeared Al Gore as a liar for lies that he never told. What will it take for political reporters to notice that Mitt Romney is a liar, and to reflect this obvious fact in their reporting?

Rommey has been "exaggerating" about himself since the beginning of his run at the presidency. Each time he is caught fabricating, it is treated by the press as a one-off, to the extent that it is addressed at all. Outside of the blogs, his individual lies have never been placed in context with all the rest of his lies.

A Boston newspaper did an admirable job of investigating Romney's most recent fabrication - that he "saw" his father march with Martin Luther King, Jr. He claimed in response that he "saw" this march figuratively, rather than literally. Okay, fine. By itself, it might be reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.

But now it turns out that Romney has been telling a variation of this lie for decades, and one version of it is a bona fide whopper that, in a rational universe, would be impossible to spin out of. [Via Andrew Sullivan]

Mitt Romney went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking about the Mormon Church and racial discrimination, he said: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Yesterday, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom acknowledged that was not true. "Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King," he said in an e-mail statement to the Globe.

This lie is a powerful indictment of Romney's character. He actually claims to have done something that he did not do - stand shoulder-to-shoulder in shared struggle with one of the most important figures in American political history. By itself, this should be enough to make political reporters and voters question Romney's fitness for high office.

But placed within the context of the falsehoods he has been telling at least since his presidential campaign began, it would be perfectly reasonable to conclude that the man is one of two things: profoundly dishonest; or mentally ill.

Obviously, I don't expect national political reporters to use the words "liar" or "crazy" when writing about Romney, but it would be responsible of them to begin emphasizing the fact that he habitually tells falsehoods on the campaign trail.

Lying about being on the front lines of the civil rights movement should be at least as worthy of examination as not lying about creating the Internet.