Romney Often Substitutes Truthiness for Truthfulness
December 26th, 2007
Blogger News Network

In the halcyon days of TV there was a game show, “To Tell The Truth,”
in which contestants bluffed – even lied – their way through their
résumés, claiming experiences and expertise they did not have. The
object of the game was to fool the panel into voting for the bogus
contestants, instead of the one who really was who (s)he claimed to
be. This seems to be the strategy Mitt Romney (R-MA) is using to get
to the White House.

Romney has falsely claimed to have been a hunter “pretty much all my
life”; to have been “endorsed” by the National Rifle Association; to
have “made it tougher for people with meth labs” when he was governor
of MA; and to have seen his father march with Martin Luther King, Jr.
(in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald, Romney had also claimed,
“My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the
streets of Detroit.”)

The New York Times asks whether Romney has a “problem with blurring
the truth”:

Some of the instances when Mr. Romney has tripped up on his facts show
that he is prone to exaggeration, taking what is essentially a kernel
of truth and stretching it to bolster his case. …
Indeed, with many of these instances, there has often been at least an
element of his truth in his claims. But for a candidate who has
featured his business background and made much of his propensity for
careful analysis of data, he is not always precise.

Not always precise? The Times must mean that, um, figuratively. Here’s
how Romney explains why no contemporaneous news accounts place him or
his father at any of King’s civil rights marches:

Mitt Romney acknowledged yesterday that he never saw his father march
with Martin Luther King Jr. as he asserted in a nationally televised
speech this month, and historical evidence shows that Michigan’s
Governor George Romney and the civil rights leader never did march
together.

Romney said his father had told him he had marched with King and that
he had been using the word “saw” in a “figurative sense.”

“If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the
term ’saw’ includes being aware of in the sense I’ve described,”
Romney told reporters in Iowa. “It’s a figure of speech and very
familiar, and it’s very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin
Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the
sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort.”
As Michael Dobbs, who writes The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog
points out:

Mitt Romney was 16 years old in 1963 at the time that Martin Luther
King organized a series of “Freedom Marches” through American cities,
including Detroit. At the time, the Mormon Church, of which the
Romneys were prominent members, still maintained an official ban on
the full participation of African-Americans in religious rites, a ban
that was not lifted until 1978. Nevertheless, the senior Romney
sympathized with the Civil Rights movement and issued a proclamation
in support of a civil rights march through Detroit in June attended by
King.

According to researchers at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project
at Stanford University, George Romney declined to attend the first
march on June 23, a Sunday, on the grounds that he would not take part
in political activity on the Sabbath. Susan Englander, who is
associate editor of the King papers, said that Romney participated in
a different march six days later through the suburb of Grosse Pointe.
She believes that it is unlikely that King was present on that
occasion, as contemporaneous newspaper reports fail to mention him.

Though the participation of the Romney père et fils at any of King’s
civil rights marches is a figment of the candidate’s overactive
imagination, he was nonetheless so moved by the thought of racism,
that his eyes welled with tears (video) on NBC’s “Meet the Press” as
he recalled hearing a news report on this car radio in 1978 that the
Mormon Church would no longer discriminate against blacks, telling Tim
Russert that he “pulled over and literally wept.”

That’s not how Romney played this supposedly seminal moment during his
unsuccessful 1994 race against Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, reports Boston
Globe columnist Joan Vennochi:
Joseph P. Kennedy II, Kennedy’s nephew and a congressman at the time,
criticized the Mormon Church for its policy of racial exclusion. The
Romney campaign angrily noted that the policy changed in 1978. Romney
said he was greatly relieved, but said nothing about weeping for joy
when he learned about it. During a press conference, Romney also
accused Kennedy of betraying his brother John’s victory in 1960 when
JFK faced voter skepticism about his Catholic religion.

Mission accomplished: Joe Kennedy apologized, and Senator Kennedy
backed off, too. Romney’s Mormon faith was off the table, where it
belongs. Romney never delved any deeper into his feelings about his
church’s past policy, saving a Bill Clinton moment for national TV and
his presidential quest.

Leaving aside that even back then, Romney used “religious bigotry” as
a smokescreen, Vennochi means “Clintonian” in a “feel your pain” sort
of way. Syndicated columnist Star Parker, uses the term in a “you
can’t trust a word out of his mouth” sort of way:

It’s doubtful that anyone needs any more reasons to explain why
Americans are fed up with politics as usual. Nevertheless, Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney has given us one more.

Apparently when Romney said, “I saw my father march with Martin Luther
King,” in his much publicized “Faith in America” speech … he meant
this “figuratively.”

According to the former Massachusetts governor, “If you look at the
literature or the dictionary the term ’saw’ includes being aware of in
the sense I have described. It is a figure of speech….”
We haven’t seen a politician parse a sentence like this since Bill
Clinton dissected the meaning of the verb “is” and explained that it
was Monica who had sex with him and not the other way around.

The next sentence in the speech following the King claim was, “I saw
my parents provide compassionate care to others, in personal ways
nearby….” Also figuratively?

It sure sounds that way to Wall Street Journal editorial board member
Jason Riley. By the time the Mormon Church issued its “Official
Declaration” on June 8, 1978, to extend “priesthood and temple
blessings to all worthy male members of the Church” – only after the
church’s then-president Spencer Kimball received a “revelation” -
Riley notes that “the U.S. was more than a century removed from a
civil war over the status of blacks; W.E.B Du Bois and Henry Moskowitz
had co-founded the NAACP; and President Truman had integrated the
military three decades before.”

Until this “revelation,” Mormons regarded people who had even “one
drop” of black in them “unrighteous,” “despised” and “loathsome”
descendants of the biblical Cain, who was cursed for killing Abel. And
afterward?

Riley cites Mormon scholar Armand Mauss who wrote in 2004 that
“ironically, the doctrinal folklore that many of us thought had been
discredited, or at least made moot, through the 1978 revelation,
continued to appear … [in church literature] written well after 1978
and continues to be taught by well-meaning teachers and leaders in the
church to this very day.”

No doubt, Romney was raised on these teachings – Riley writes that by
in 1978, “Romney was a 31-year-old vice president at Bain & Co. and a
lifelong devout Mormon. Throughout his current campaign for the
Republican nomination, Mr. Romney has declined to distance himself
from the repugnant racial teachings of his church.”

What if in addition to refusing to repudiate the (past?) racism of the
Mormon Church, Romney himself repeated these repugnant doctrines while
trying to win converts as a missionary in France, or teaching Sunday
school as a church bishop?

The MSM shouldn’t allow Romney to hide behind “anti-Mormon bigotry” inrefusing to answer questions about his beliefs – or buy into the
fiction that asking such questions of a presidential candidate is
imposing an unconstitutional “religious test.” As Riley puts it,
“[i]t’s due diligence.”
Especially, as some suggest, the lack of truthfulness about Mormonism
may go beyond Romney’s own personal problems with honesty.

In a Townhall.com column radio talk show host Bob Burney (weekday
afternoons, WRFD, 880 AM in Columbus, OH) asks, “What has happened to
the simple principle of telling the truth?,” referring to “notable
change in the way the LDS Church presents itself to the general
public, an effort that began sometime around the 2002 Winter Olympics
in Salt Lake City”:

Prior to that, there was not a readily-apparent effort by Mormons to
identify themselves as a form of Christianity. … I remember a time
when it was common for Mormons to be offended if you called them
Christian. That was then.

Sometime around 2002 a very noticeable shift occurred. Suddenly they
wanted to be accepted as a part of mainstream Christianity … [E]ven a
peripheral study of Mormonism will reveal that the Jesus of Mormonism
isn’t even in the same universe (literally) as the Jesus of orthodox
Christianity. The Jesus of Mormonism is the “spirit child” of his
“heavenly parents.” He is in no way part of a triune Godhead. …

At the same time, the official LDS Web site was totally overhauled and
some of the more bizarre doctrines held by the Church were carefully
hidden deep within the site - doctrines such as “the Fall” actually
being a good thing … the ability to actually become a God and have
your own planet to rule over … that Jesus and Lucifer (yes, Satan)
were actually brothers. …
This is America. You can believe anything you want. … If you believe
it, be proud of it - don’t try to hide it. …

[When presidential candidate Mike] Huckabee … wondered out loud to the
veteran religion reporter Zev Chafets: “Don’t Mormons believe that
Jesus and the devil are brothers?” Well, that’s exactly what they
believe! Several news outlets immediately accused Huckabee of
attacking Romney’s religion. Blogs went berserk!

How did candidate Romney respond to someone revealing what his church
actually believes? He said, “But I think attacking someone’s religion
is really going too far. It’s just not the American way, and I think
people will reject that,” Romney told NBC’s “Today” show. …

Does this have anything to do with Mitt Romney and his qualifications
to be president? Everyone will have to decide that in his or her own
heart. I just wish the Mormons, including Mitt Romney, would simply be
more candid and tell us the straight truth about their religion.

And who ran 2002 Winter Olympics when the Mormons were busy
repackaging their religion for public (read MSM) consumption? Romney.

The only way John Fund, Hugh Hewitt, Charles Krauthammer and other
pundits can call people who are asking inconvenient questions (in
other words, doing their jobs for them) “bigots” is to choose to
remain ignorant by confined their “research” on Mormonism to marketing
materials sanctioned by the Mormon Church. They have abrogated their
responsibilities as journalists by not bothering to delve into the
“doctrinal folklore” that Fund’s colleague Riley briefly touches on inhis column – unwritten, passed orally from Sunday school teacher to
future priests and missionaries. For instance, Fund once dismissed the
“White Horse Prophesy” as a fantasy. Perhaps he ought to bestir
himself to look further into it.

To answer Burney’s question, if a man can lie about his core beliefs
he will lie about everything else – and Romney’s record of flip-
flopping on abortion and other fundamental issues certainly bears this
out. If the pundits weren’t so busy ascribing character flaws to
people who balk at voting for Romney, the candidate’s reluctance to
forthrightly discuss Mormonism - further, to lie about its doctrines
(second item) – would have raised red flags a long time ago.

As Parker bluntly puts it: “Republicans can win back the hearts and
minds of Americans. But they have to get real and get honest. Unlike
the former governor of Massachusetts.”

http://www.truthandgrace.com/mormonhistory.htm

http://www.truthandgrace.com/rigdon1.htm