That may be the case for something that happened before I was born, but not a thing that I witnessed. Regardless, Mitt hasn't made that defense. He's said his statement in the "Faith in America" speech was only meant figuratively, and he actually got rather prissy defending that point of view by pointing to his English major credentials and the dictionary definitions of "saw".
The trouble for him is that this 1978 statement to a reporter has emerged, and you can't even fit that one into a "I meant it figuratively" meme. It's way too specific. It underscores my belief that Mitt was just lying in '07, and that his "figurative" spin was just a panicked attempt at explanation that he probably should have waited on a little before committing to.
Why would Romney purposely lie about this in 1978, and again in 2007? Maybe he's just a born liar, Charles. You know that that's been one of the main objections to the man even before this came out.
There's a clear pattern here.
Romney's honesty problem (Mitt lied about his own mother's position on abortion?! 8/07)
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously bad. People's memories rarely match what actually happened with accuracy.
If you think about what makes a "memory", you'll realise how silly it is to even EXPECT that how you "remember" something 30 years later will match how it really happened.
Heck, ask 5 people about something they all just did together yesterday, and already you'll find discrepancies in the stories. Ask them 10 years later, and you'll think they are decribing different events.
When Allen was being accused of using the "N-word" last year, they'd bring some nice old lady out to say "He said it at this party I was at, in the living room", and then someone would say "I was in the living room, and he never said it", and someone else would say "we were in the dining room, not the living room".