I do not own a dog...

[MADem]

47. The confirmation came from Mittsy, Tagg, et. al. You can't wish that away.

Why can't you allow us to walk and chew gum at the same time? Most of us can manage it.

If you don't like this thread, and you don't want to go on sounding like Mitt's campaign manager, you can always hide it, you know.

But you can't change the written record.

And your link? All that tells us is what I NEVER KNEW in the first place--that there was an unfounded assertion that Mitt drove through a car wash to clean off the dog.

Tagg simply verified that Mitt turned a hose of cold water on the dog and the car....the REST OF THE QUOTE:

But I was determined to avoid a situation where Romney’s handlers could call into question the anecdote—or the entire article—because I had gotten some small detail wrong. So I insisted that Tagg poll his mother and brothers and persisted until I had confirmed every last fact. Far from being tone-deaf, Tagg realized as I dug deeper that the story could cause his father grief. Yet Tagg’s participation actually helped his dad. After all, the first version of the story I’d heard from the family friend—who hadn’t been an eyewitness—improbably had Mitt driving the station wagon right through a carwash. Imagine the howls from PETA if Seamus had been introduced to the world with the image of high-pressure wraparound brushes pummeling a defenseless, diarrheal dog.

Your "factor in mitigation" doesn't help to mitigate at all--all it tells us is that Tagg and the rest of the family DID confirm the Globe article, which I have linked to in this thread.