Okay, I've invested a lot of my credibility saying how I think Mitt Romney is the odds on guy to take the Republican nomination. So I really don't take kindly to him making such a fool of himself that he's threatening his shot at the nomination.

TPM's Eric Kleefeld just found this latest installment from NBC's FirstRead on the brouhaha over Romney's claim to having seen his pops, George Romney marching with Martin Luther King ...

Romney says that it depends on what the definition of "saw" is.

A defensive Romney was peppered with questions today on exactly what he meant when he said -- most recently on Meet the Press -- that he "saw" his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. Recent articles have indicated that his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, didn't march with the civil-rights leader.

Admitting that he didn't see the march with his own eyes, he said, "I 'saw' him in the figurative sense."

"The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights," he said, "and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership."

"I've tried to be as accurate as I can be," he continued, smiling firmly. "If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of -- in the sense I've described."

The questioning did not relent. "I'm an English literature major," he insisted at one point. "When we say I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn't necessarily mean you were there." (He meant the Super Bowl, of course.)

Seriously, after all I've said about his strengths in the GOP nomination race, I think Mitt owes me a little more than to make a fool of himself like this. More seriously, I've seen lots of pols get tripped up on stuff like this -- memories that turn out never to have happened. Sometimes certainly they're just fibbing. But I think it's actually not that uncommon to have childhood or decades-old memories of events get conflated or blurred. Our minds are not Xerox machines or hard disks. And memories get shaped and distorted by subsequent events, desires, understandings of ourselves and a lot else. So often these falsehoods aren't lies or even necessarily conscious embellishments.

I haven't looked enough into this particular case of Romney, his dad and King to have any particular opinion one way or another of which it is, though his pretty obvious fibbing in the Muslim cabinet member episode doesn't give me a lot of confidence in his candor. But when you have to start referring to dictionary definitions or you lit degree to add weight to your dingbat hermeneutics it's just time to pack it in.