"Evidence contradicts story"

Evidence contradicts story (0.00 / 0)

Does anyone know if this story is getting any attention in Iowa?  

Tom

---

by: pikldog @ Fri Dec 21, 2007 at 10:40:31 AM CST

Mark Halperin of Time Magazine has a different account (3.00 / 3)

His 'timeline for George Romney is HERE

Apparently, unlike Mr. Bernstein, he looked beyond elderly unpaid volunteers at the Grosse Pointe Historical Society who told him what he hoped to hear, and actually checked the morgue of the Detroit Free Press.

How VERY un-Phoenix or Globe!

Yr. Obedient Servant, Peter Porcupine, Republican

---

by: Peter Porcupine @ Fri Dec 21, 2007 at 11:13:30 AM CST

No one... (0.00 / 0)

..is refuting the Mitt's dad had a good record on Civil Rights as a politician.  But you will note that nothing in Time says the he marched WITH MLK or the Mitt Witnessed that which did not happen.

Mitt still lied, his father's commendable actions notwithstanding.

Doesn't really change a thing.

---

by: anthony @ Fri Dec 21, 2007 at 11:38:58 AM CST

[ Parent ]

Whatever (6.00 / 1)

"My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Not to mention, the Time article cites the Broder book.  The information in the Broder book was talked about yesterday and found to be of questionable accuracy.

Peter. Mitt lied. He made stuff about about he and his Dad marching with MLK so that he may benefit.  No one is buying your spin.  Come join us in Reality Land and just admit the truth.  

Let me get this straight: Democrats protest war, Republicans protest health care?

---

by: tblade @ Fri Dec 21, 2007 at 11:40:08 AM CST

[ Parent ]

Oh, PP. (6.00 / 2)

Your peerless (some might say "mindless") devotion to your candidate is, well, peerless.  But he's been caught out -- badly -- on this one.  Bernstein went well beyond talking to the Grosse Pointe historical society (though that was a good move), and other journalists (including the Detroit Free Press, which has dug through its own archives) have followed.  For instance, Bernstein dug up a NY Times story from the day after the Detroit march that Broder erroneously thinks George Romney marched in.

However, numerous contemporaneous and historical accounts say that Romney did not participate in the Detroit Freedom March, because it was held on the Sabbath. The New York Times, for example, wrote the next day that "Gov. George Romney, who is Mormon and does not make public appearances on Sundays, issued a special proclamation."

Again, no one is disputing that George Romney was solid on civil rights, or that he supported Dr. King.  Or even that he probably would have marched in the Detroit march, had it not been on a Sunday.  That's not the point.  The point is that Mitt is caught in a false statement, and he's desperately trying to worm his way out of it.  Read my post again, because you've obviously missed the point of it.

One thing I continually notice about Republican devotees such as yourself: when your candidate fucks up, you never, ever admit it.  You just blame the media, or the bloggers, or someone (anyone) else, and mention that some Democrats are bad too.  We, on the other hand, frequently criticize our candidates when we think they've screwed up.  Must be that whole "authoritarian personality" thing.

---

by: David @ Fri Dec 21, 2007 at 12:10:34 PM CST

[ Parent ]

OK, I was fooled. (6.00 / 1)

This whole incident struck me as so out of character that I guess I missed something.

Not that His Expediency would ever miss a chance to burnish his own brand--far from it. But this is just such a dumb thing to do.

This speech was Romney's big moment, long planned and anticipated, and frankly a easy swing at the ball. He and his staff surely went over it more than once, vetting it for gaffes. He runs a very disciplined, measured shop.

So what gives?

Surely, if the staff had known that this was a fabrication figurative use of language, someone would have said, Boss, this is asking for trouble. Let's rewrite it.

No one did know that--with one possible exception--so the whole thing has blown up and his campaign is clinging to the pathetic "it all depends on what the meaning of 'saw' is" thing.

Saying something is true because it would be pretty if it were is a hallmark of, say, Reagan. Not Mr. Buttoned Down. So I think this incident tells us something important about him, though I'm not sure what. (For instance: did he believe it when he said it?)

David's explanation is the only credible one I have heard. Romney's, of course, is a lie figurative use of language.

---

by: Trickle up @ Fri Dec 21, 2007 at 13:37:49 PM CST

Did Ginsberg really see this? (1.50 / 2)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
             madness, starving hysterical naked,
      dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
             looking for an angry fix,
      angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
             connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
             ery of night,
      who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
             up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
             cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
             contemplating jazz,
      who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
             saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
             ment roofs illuminated,
      who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
             hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
             among the scholars of war,
      who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
             publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
             skull,
      who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
             ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
             to the Terror through the wall,
      who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
             Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
      who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
             Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
             torsos night after night
      with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
             cohol and cock and endless balls,
      incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
             lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
             Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
             tionless world of Time between,
      Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
             dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
             storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
             blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
             vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
             lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
      who chained themselves to subways for the endless
             ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
             until the noise of wheels and children brought
             them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
             battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
             in the drear light of Zoo,
      who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
             floated out and sat through the stale beer after
             noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
             of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
      who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
             pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
             lyn Bridge,
      lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
             down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
             off Empire State out of the moon,
      yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
             and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
             and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
      whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
             and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
             Synagogue cast on the pavement,
      who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
             trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
             City Hall,
      suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
             ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
             drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
      who wandered around and around at midnight in the
             railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
             leaving no broken hearts,
      who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
             through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
             father night,
      who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
             athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
             stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
      who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
             ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
             angels,
      who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
             gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
      who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
             homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
             light smalltown rain,
      who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
             seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
             brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
             and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
             to Africa,
      who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
             behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
             and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
             place Chicago,
      who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
             F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
             eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
             prehensible leaflets,
      who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
             the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
      who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
             Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
             of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
             down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
             wailed,
      who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
             and trembling before the machinery of other
             skeletons,
      who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
             in policecars for committing no crime but their
             own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
      who howled on their knees in the subway and were
             dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
             scripts,
      who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
             motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
      who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
             the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
             love,
      who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
             gardens and the grass of public parks and
             cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
             whomever come who may,
      who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
             with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
             when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
             them with a sword,
      who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
             the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
             the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
             and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
             sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
             threads of the craftsman's loom,
      who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
             beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
             dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
             the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
             on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
             come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
      who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
             in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
             but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
             rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
             in the lake,
      who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
             stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
             poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
             to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
             in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
             rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
             gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
             ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
             solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
      who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
             dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
             picked themselves up out of basements hung
             over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
             Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
             ment offices,
      who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
             the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
             East River to open to a room full of steamheat
             and opium,
      who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
             cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
             blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
             be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
      who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
             the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
             Bowery,
      who wept at the romance of the streets with their
             pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
      who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
             bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
             their lofts,
      who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
             with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
             by orange crates of theology,
      who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
             incantations which in the yellow morning were
             stanzas of gibberish,
      who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
             & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
             kingdom,
      who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
             an egg,
      who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
             for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
             fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
      who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
             fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
             stores where they thought they were growing
             old and cried,
      who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
             on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
             & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
             of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
             fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
             ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
             drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
      who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
             pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
             into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
             ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
      who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
             the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
             saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
             danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
             phonograph records of nostalgic European
             1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
             threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
             in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
             whistles,
      who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
             to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
             watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
      who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
             if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
             a vision to find out Eternity,
      who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
             came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
             watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
             Denver and finally went away to find out the
             Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
      who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
             for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
             until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
      who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
             impossible criminals with golden heads and the
             charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
             blues to Alcatraz,
      who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
             Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
             or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
             Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
             daisychain or grave,
      who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
             notism & were left with their insanity & their
             hands & a hung jury,
      who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
             and subsequently presented themselves on the
             granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
             and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
             stantaneous lobotomy,
      and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
             Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
             therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
             amnesia,
      who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
             pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
      returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
             blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
             man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
             East,
      Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
             halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
             ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
             dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
             mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
             moon,
      with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
             flung out of the tenement window, and the last
             door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
             slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
             nished room emptied down to the last piece of
             mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
             on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
             imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
             hallucination
      ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
             now you're really in the total animal soup of
             time
      and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
             with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
             of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
             ing plane,
      who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
             through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
             archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
             and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
             and dash of consciousness together jumping
             with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
             Deus
      to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
             prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
             ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
             fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
             of thought in his naked and endless head,
      the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
             yet putting down here what might be left to say
             in time come after death,
      and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
             the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
             suffering of America's naked mind for love into
             an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
             cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
      with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
             out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
             years.

                          II

      What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
             their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
             nation?
      Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
             tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
             stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
             weeping in the parks!
      Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
             loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
             judger of men!
      Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
             crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
             sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
             Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
             ned governments!
      Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
             blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
             are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
             bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
             tomb!
      Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
             Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
             streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
             tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
             smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
      Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
             whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
             whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
             whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
             Moloch whose name is the Mind!
      Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
             Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
             Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
      Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
             I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
             who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
             Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
             Light streaming out of the sky!
      Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
             skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
             industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
             houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
      They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
             ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
             Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
             us!
      Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
             gone down the American river!
      Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
             boatload of sensitive bullshit!
      Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
             gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
             spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
             Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
             the rocks of Time!
      Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
             wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
             They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
             carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
             street!

                          III

      Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
             where you're madder than I am
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you must feel very strange
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you imitate the shade of my mother
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you laugh at this invisible humor
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where we are great writers on the same dreadful
             typewriter
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where your condition has become serious and
             is reported on the radio
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
             the worms of the senses
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
             spinsters of Utica
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
             harpies of the Bronx
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
             losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
             abyss
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
             is innocent and immortal it should never die
             ungodly in an armed madhouse
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where fifty more shocks will never return your
             soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
             cross in the void
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
             plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
             fascist national Golgotha
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where you will split the heavens of Long Island
             and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
             superhuman tomb
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
             rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where we hug and kiss the United States under
             our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
             night and won't let us sleep
      I'm with you in Rockland
             where we wake up electrified out of the coma
             by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
             roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
             hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
             lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
             spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
             here O victory forget your underwear we're
             free
      I'm with you in Rockland
             in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
             journey on the highway across America in tears
             to the door of my cottage in the Western night

---

by: they @ Fri Dec 21, 2007 at 18:50:22 PM CST

Romney is not a poet. (5.33 / 3)

He's a candidate for President of the United States. When I want fiction, I go to the Boston Public Library, not to my presidential candidate.

Cutting and pasting Howl is one of the worst Pro-Romney, Pro-Republican arguments I have ever seen on the internet.  

Let me get this straight: Democrats protest war, Republicans protest health care?

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by: tblade @ Fri Dec 21, 2007 at 19:10:11 PM CST

[ Parent ]

Pro-Republican? (0.00 / 0)

It's not pro-Romney so much as anti all this silly fuss.  Speeches are poetic.  Did anyone challenge MLK what night exactly he had that supposed dream?  Did anyone complain that Kennedy was not, in fact, a Berliner?  Or that it had been in fact 87 years, 4 months and 16 days since our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation?

And I hope some people here enjoy reading Howl, maybe they haven't read it since high school, and it is a good thing to read.  (And Ginsberg wasn't "with" Carl in Rockford, either).

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by: they @ Sat Dec 22, 2007 at 14:05:00 PM CST

[ Parent ]

Scowl (6.00 / 5)

I saw the best hair of my generation
       bleached and blasted by ambition, lust, greed

Helplessly stalking St. Martin's ghost
       through the angry streets of Grosse Pointe
       for a political fix

Weeping on the Fresh Pond Parkway,
       brainwashed by his holy father,
       always hedging his bets

Drinking tea off the breasts of Planned Parenthood
       brewing betrayal in sacred underwear

Who believes Jesus Christ is the son of God
       and the savior of Mankind (if you will)

Who fell on his sword against Joe and Teddy
       the better to rise again harder smoother
       more lustrous, shouting Golly! Golly! Golly! Golly!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
       skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
       industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
       houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

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by: Trickle up @ Sat Dec 22, 2007 at 15:02:20 PM CST

[ Parent ]

Wow! (0.00 / 0)

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by: David @ Sat Dec 22, 2007 at 15:09:28 PM CST

[ Parent ]

I saw this today... (0.00 / 0)

Politics 1 reports the following:

"ROMNEY: Despite widespread media doubts, Mitt Romney told the truth when he claimed this week that his father had marched for civil rights with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Politico reports eyewitnesses stepped forward to verify that then-Michigan Governor George Romney walked side-by-side with King in a 1963 civil rights march in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. A reference to George Romney participating in the 1963 Grosse Point march was also found in a political book published in 1967. While Mitt Romney was not present to personally view it, his memory of the event taking place proved correct. Romney had also been criticized for falsely claiming he "saw" his father march with King, although he later explained he was speaking figuratively."

So maybe Mitt Romney did not personally witness the march, but this seems to be saying that his father indeed did march "with" MLK in the most literal sense.

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by: Christopher @ Sat Dec 22, 2007 at 08:29:17 AM CST

Weirder and weirder (0.00 / 0)

To recap: Romney says it happened and he saw it. Then admits it didn't literally happen and he was speaking figuratively (and says of course "seeing" doesn't mean in the sense of eyeballs).

Now two witnesses say it did actually really happen, not in the figurative sense, and that they really saw it with their actual eyeballs. (Sorry if that's a bit overboard, just want to be clear that this was non-figurative visual seeing of something that objectively happened in reality.)

So how come Romney didn't remember that? It's a pretty wierd coincidence that the very claim he has essentially retracted ("clarified") turned out to be true.

Or did he know it was true when he retracted it, because he had made a political calculation that if he persisted in saying it was an objective fact he would risk looking more like a faker?

What was he fabricating--his original memory of what he "saw," or his subsequent explanation of what "saw' and "march" mean?

Of course the witnesses' memories could be honestly false, in which case it never happened and we are back to the original inflated claims (of marching as in feet and of seeing as in eyes) and their retraction into figurativeness and poetry.

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by: Trickle up @ Sat Dec 22, 2007 at 09:45:52 AM CST

[ Parent ]

It's Republican Swift Boat Reality (0.00 / 0)

By the time the witnesses are debunked, the waters will have been muddied and that's all that matters.  Objective reality isn't relevant.  

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by: huh @ Sat Dec 22, 2007 at 16:05:35 PM CST

[ Parent ]

Not proven. (0.00 / 0)

I think it highly unlikely that the only people who saw Dr. King march in that Grosse Pointe march were the two ladies who have come forward.  Contemporary accounts of that march uniformly fail to mention Dr. King, and a more or less official record of King's appearances doesn't mention Grosse Pointe.  Here's Bernstein:

Contemporaneous news accounts confirm that George Romney, then governor of Michigan, unexpectedly joined that Grosse Pointe march, which took place on June 29, 1963, six days after King led a large Freedom March in Detroit, which Romney did not attend.

None of those accounts of the June 29 event in Grosse Pointe mention King's presence.

An Associated Press report of the event, which ran in several newspapers the following day, reported that "this Saturday's orderly parade attracted an estimated 250 people." The report mentions that Romney had rejected the invitation to participate in the earlier Detroit march, because it was held on Sunday.

The Detroit Free Press has reported that its coverage of the event, which estimated the crowd at 500, describes George Romney attending, but not King. A New York Times account of the event likewise mentions Romney but not King.

Another Associated Press story, which also appeared in newspapers of Sunday, June 30, 1963, says that Dr. King spoke to an AFL-CIO gathering in New Brunswick, New Jersey, that Saturday of the Grosse Pointe event.

Earlier today, the Boston Globe quoted Susan Englander, assistant editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, saying that: "I researched this question, and indeed it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King."

Grosse Pointe historians have told the Phoenix that King was not at that June 29, 1963 march in that town.

A detailed timeline of all of Martin Luther King Jr.'s appearances in Michigan appeared earlier this year in the Michigan Citizen, compiled by Paul Lee; it includes the June 23 march in Detroit, but not the June 29 event in Grosse Pointe.

"The answer is no, Governor Romney did not march with Dr. King -- not in Detroit, not in Grosse Pointe," Lee emailed the Phoenix.

Among other things, don't you think more than 250-500 people would have shown up if Dr. King were marching?  And how likely is it that Dr. King attended two marches that day, one in Grosse Pointe and one in New Jersey?

So it's a gross overstatement to declare, contrary to all of the contemporary evidence and based entirely on these two alleged eyewitnesses to an event that's over 40 years old, that Romney "told the truth."  I'd say the historical record unearthed by Bernstein and others is a whole lot more persuasive.

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by: David @ Sat Dec 22, 2007 at 13:10:28 PM CST

[ Parent ]

In any case, (0.00 / 0)

Mitt Romney has proved that he's not to be trusted.  Like most, if not all of today's Republicans, he was a "wolf in sheep's clothing".  When he was running for governor of the Bay State, he campaigned as a "moderate" on issues, managing to pull the wool over the Bay State   electorate's eyes (not me--I didn't vote for him), and get himself elected governor of Massachusetts.  When people finally saw through his campaign, it was too late;  many people had gotten screwed, and he messed a lot of things up, including the Big Dig, which helpd result in a tragic fatality.

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by: mplo @ Sat Dec 22, 2007 at 10:18:22 AM CST

By the way... (0.00 / 0)

...although Romney may have been in involved in the founding of Bain Capital LLC, the history of its founding and up-front funding is far more complicated.  Do some rooting around the Internet.

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by: raj @ Sat Dec 22, 2007 at 12:49:23 PM CST