{"id":11049,"date":"2007-06-07T14:20:32","date_gmt":"2007-06-07T18:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11049.html"},"modified":"2007-06-07T14:20:32","modified_gmt":"2007-06-07T18:20:32","slug":"what-is-mitt-romney-talking-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/what-is-mitt-romney-talking-about\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Mitt Romney talking about?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, we talked a bit<\/a> about Mitt Romney’s bizarre belief, articulated during Tuesday’s debate, that Saddam Hussein refused to open Iraq up to IAEA inspectors, despite reality. As it turns out, Romney’s answer was actually worse than I originally suggested.<\/p>\n

Let’s take another look at the transcript<\/a>. Romney was asked whether it was “a mistake for us to invade Iraq.” Before the inexplicable remarks about weapons inspectors, Romney tried to dodge the question, saying, “Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will, and what I mean by that — or a null set.”<\/p>\n

Eventually, Blitzer followed up, and repeated the question. Romney repeated the dodge: “Well, I answered the question by saying it’s a — it’s a non sequitur, it’s a null set kind of question.”<\/p>\n

I was so caught up with the nonsense about the inspectors, that I neglected to notice how dumb the rest of the answer was, too.<\/p>\n

A “non sequitur<\/a>” is a “conclusion that does not follow from the premises or evidence.” Romney was asked whether the invasion was a mistake. In no way<\/i> was the question a “non sequitur.” Either the invasion was a good idea or it wasn’t.<\/p>\n

A “null set<\/a>” is a set that contains no elements. In the context of the question about Iraq, Romney’s use of the phrase doesn’t make any sense — either time.<\/p>\n

Now, I’m not just mentioning this to pick on Romney’s incoherence — though I do enjoy that a bit — but rather to highlight two additional problems.
\n
\nFirst, as Mark Kleiman explained<\/a>, ABC’s The Note was impressed<\/i> with Romney’s mistakes, asking whether the nation is “ready for a president who uses the term ‘null set’.”<\/p>\n

The question is whether the nation is ready for a president who mis<\/i><\/b>uses the term “null set,” twice. […]<\/p>\n

Is Romney trying out for the Kevin Kline role in A Fish Called Wanda: the guy who uses big words he doesn’t understand and misquotes absurdly from famous authors? (As the Jamie Lee Curtis character might say, “A hypothetical question, even one based on an absurd hypothesis, isn’t a non sequitur. Neither has any connection with the null set. These are mistakes<\/i>, Mitt. I looked them up.”)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Second, Brian Beutler noticed<\/a> that Romney made this same mistake a month ago on Fox News. Sean Hannity asked whether he would have followed the same path Bush took on Iraq, prompting Romney to say that the question is “almost a null set.”<\/p>\n

It’s evidence that — at the very least — Romney has been bandying about this malapropism for weeks and nobody on his staff either realizes he’s wrong or dares correct him. It’s also evidence that he didn’t just screw up his Iraq history at the debates on Tuesday, but rather that he’s in a constant state of either denial, ignorance, or deception.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what are we left with? A leading presidential candidate pretending to be sophisticated, repeatedly misusing phrases he doesn’t understand, and describing a history with Iraq that never happened.<\/p>\n

Gotta love the Republican top tier, don’t you? They appear anxious to follow in Bush’s footsteps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, we talked a bit about Mitt Romney’s bizarre belief, articulated during Tuesday’s debate, that Saddam Hussein refused to open Iraq up to IAEA inspectors, despite reality. As it turns out, Romney’s answer was actually worse than I originally suggested. Let’s take another look at the transcript. Romney was asked whether it was “a mistake […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}