'Ch-ch-ch-Changes'

Granted, Mitt Romney is a walking, talking target-of-opportunity for mocking. He can't help being endearingly goofy. But sometimes the high school derision goes a tad too far. Yesterday, Romney told a New Hampshire Town Hall audience that he's often tagged as being a flip-flopper. "Well, in the private sector, if you don't change your view when the facts change, well you'll get fired for being stubborn and stupid." Romney said in his own defense. "Winston Churchill said, 'When the facts change, I change too, Madam.'" Good line. Except Churchill never said it, as MSNBC's First Read and other lefty blogs were only too happy to point out. The quote, most scholars believe, actually belongs to Churchill compatriot John Maynard Keynes, the famed British economist whose theories are "loathed by many conservatives." Oh-the-irony, First Read mocked gleefully, Romney is such a clueless dolt. Romney, a Harvard law (cum laude) grad and certainly no dummy, probably had this Churchill quote in mind before his brain-wiring crossed: "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often." Yes, as Churchill quipped, "we are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out." And yes, Romney mucked it up and, as David Bowie sung in "Changes," he's obliged to "turn and face the strain." But on this score, Romney could take his tormentors down a notch by citing another Churchillian witticism: "A fanatic [or a lefty blogger] is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject."