House of Burgess

A few months ago I found the following entry on Time.com. It is the seventh part in an series entitled "Mitt Romney's Top Ten Gaffees". Most of them are pretty funny, but this one ("The Seven Year Itch") absolutely floored me. Here it is in it's entirety:

The Seven Year Itch By Ana Marie Cox

"In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past."
(May 5, 2007)

In his most bizarre misstatement of the past three months — including the Battlefield Earth shout-out! — Romney used the occasion of a commencement address at Regents University to condemn a non-existent French marriage policy. The line was picked up, without comment, by the Washington Post; when reporters tried to suss out what the candidate could possibly be referring to, a spokesman referred them to France's civil union agreements...which have no set end date, either. One possible source for the impressively specific legalese ups the odd quotient even further: Seven-year marriage contracts are a plot point in the "Memories of Earth" science fiction series by Mormon author Orson Scott Card, itself a retelling of the Mormon theology in which the limited marriages stand in for the other non-traditional marriage practices of that faith. What's Romney really trying to say here? That the French are Mormons? That they're from outer space?

For me, that's it. Case closed. He doesn't get to the most powerful man in the world. Forget the fact that he mentioned Hitler in a positive light or that he said he wanted to "double Guantanamo"-- in his mind he's just wandering back and forth between reality and the plot of a science fiction book.
Who knows what other misinformation and half-truths are hiding just behind that perfect head of hair of his.