The discovery of Mitt's Boson

Even with four months to go until Election Day, Mitt Romney's shameless lying has already become one of the defining storylines of the 2012 campaign. Theories abound as to why Romney has emerged as a reverse George Washington, a man who cannot tell the truth. Jonathan Chait turned to Freud, explaining there's a clinical term for Mitt's compulsive aversion to the truth known as "fundamental attribution error." Rick Perlstein suggested Romney's pathological dissembling could be viewed in Shakespearean terms, with Mitt playing an undoubting Hamlet determined to avenge his father's defeat most foul in 1968. Meanwhile, Paul Krugman and Mark Kleiman applied deconstructionist theory to Romney's "post-truth campaign" and "post-modern way with the facts." And in "A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney", "The Romney Uncertainty Principle" and "Schrödinger's Romney," analysts turned to particle physics to explain why on almost any issue, Mitt Romney's position changes when observed.

But how Mitt Romney is able to get away with his effortless dishonesty has remained one of politics' enduring mysteries'until now. Steve Benen, whose series "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity" has already reached volume XXIV, posited:

"Romney gets away with it because he and his team realize contemporary political journalism isn't equipped to deal with a candidate who lies this much, about so many topics, so often."

Put another way, Mitt Romney's falsehoods occur faster than can be observed, measured, reported and, most importantly, understood by the media charged with investigating them. The result is that voters, or at least some of them, are attracted to rather than repelled by the Republican nominee. And it's that elusive force and the distortion field it produces which give Romney's presidential campaign its critical mass and threaten to turn back the hands of time.

Call it Mitt's Boson.

Continue reading below the fold.