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This is one of the major reasons Romney cannot be trusted.

He uses phrases and terms that have well-established meanings over decades in the public policy debate, but secretly applies his own meaning to them, knowing that his use of the terms (as he defines them) will mislead the broader audience.

Thus, he says he supports a “Human Life Amendment.”

To pro-life activists, that for years has meant a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Romney uses the term HLA knowing that’s what pro-lifers will assume he means.

But no, he has his own secret meaning. To him, it could mean an amendment that merely lets New York and Mass continue to allow the taking of prenatal life.

Obviously dishonest, and intentionally so.

Similarly, when Mitt says he’s “always been for life,” he knows pro-lifers will assume by that that he’s always been “pro-life” in the well-defined political sense, i.e, in favor of adopting legal restrictions banning abortion with a variety of exceptions.

But no, the secret meaning he attaches to the term is that he was “personally” against abortion, while he of course had spent a couple decades expressing support for Roe and “a woman’s right” to pay an abortionist to terminate her prenatal child’s life.

Similarly, he said last Sunday that he “wasn’t pro-choice” even in those times — up til July 2005 — when he clearly supported Roe and “a woman’s right to choose.” (Guess it all depends on what your definition of the word “choice” is, a la Clinton.)

Similarly, he boasted a few months ago that he was a life member of the NRA, knowing that the uninformed listener would believe he meant that he’d been a lifelong supporter of the NRA. Nope, he just had enough money to buy a “life membership” last August, after being critical of the NRA and endorsing gun control while governor.

Similar word games at play when he says he “support(s) the right of the Boy Scouts to decide their own policy” regarding the ban on homosexual Scouts and Scoutmasters — obviously intended to lead the listener to believe that the supports the Boy Scout policy. When in fact he opposed it in 1994 and still does today.

Bill Clinton was an amateur at this stuff.

Mitt’s the worst I’ve ever witnessed.

As Rush Limbaugh says, “words have meaning,” and one of the main reasons you simply cannot trust Romney is that you cannot trust something as basic as his use of the English language. To him, being “for life” means supporting abortion on demand. You can never be sure what he means by the same words the rest of us use every day, which allow us to communicate because we trust that when the other guy uses the word “is,” he means the same thing by it that we do.

We had a president once before we couldn’t trust, who wanted wiggle room over the definitions of what plain English words mean (such as “is”).

Surely we do not want another one any time soon.