If you're going to exaggerate about MLK...

If you're a Republican presidential candidate and you've made up your mind to exaggerate something about the nature of your relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., you're gonna want to do it the Mitt Romney way:

Mitt Romney went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking about the Mormon Church and racial discrimination, he said: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Of course, neither Romney nor his father marched with King in Detroit. But the point is that a modern politician knows that if you're gonna lie about MLK, you lie about how much you liked and admired him.

On the other hand, if you're a Stone Age Republican like John McCain, this doesn't occur to you. Instead, you exaggerate by minimizing your recognition of King's impact on and importance to modern American society:

Reporter: What didn't you know when you voted initially against it that you later knew when you changed your mind?

McCain: I had not really been involved in the issue. I just had not had a lot of experience with the issue. That's all.

Or else you pretend you've only kinda-sorta heard of him:

"They never gave us any meaningful news," McCain said. "They told us the day that Martin Luther King was shot, they told us the day that Bobby Kennedy was shot, but they never bothered to tell us about the moon shot. So it was certainly selected news."

It's interesting, though, isn't it? McCain says the assassinations of King and Kennedy weren't really "meaningful," to a P.O.W. And I can certainly understand how your one's own seemingly hopeless captivity could do that to you. But yet McCain would have us believe that he whiled away the hours tapping away excitedly in code to his fellow prisoners about the virtues of Ronald Reagan:

Mindful of many conservatives' nostalgia for Ronald Reagan -- and opposition to himself -- Sen. McCain used his victory speech to associate himself with the late president. Alluding to his days as a Vietnam prisoner of war, he said, "I stand for the principles and policies that first attracted me to the Republican Party when I heard, in whispered conversations and tap codes, about the then governor of California, who stood by me and my comrades....And I am as proud to be a Reagan conservative today, as I was then."

Really.

Never really "got" MLK, but engaged in secret tap code rap sessions about Ronald Reagan.

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Mmm-hmm.