Mitt Romney spoke to an audience at Virginia Beach today:

"It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking," Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. "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."

Pon Farr--It's not just for Vulcans any more! (Insert obligatory ironic riff from The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, here.)

After noting that Romney is apparently mistaking a plot point from one of Orson Scott Card's science fiction novels with that shared consensual hunch that we like to call--and note the jaunty lack of postmodern quotation marks around the word--reality, Ace makes a great point:

Of course, while the right-leaning blogs point out such strange delusions of our candidates, you can bet damnsure neither Anna Marie Cox nor any other lefty in the media will make mention of John Edwards' far more calculated and vicious embrace of alt-history fantasy.

Rob Port adds:

At the GOP primary debate the Presidential candidates were asked tough questions about their beliefs with regard to evolution. With big-name Democrats like Edwards and Kerry apparently taking these “truthers” seriously, maybe some enterprising reporters should go around asking the Democrat Presidential candidates about their feelings with regard to 9/11 conspiracy theories.

If--miracle of miracle--that actually happens, and it's late enough in the campaign season, will the reporter who finally has the nerve to ask that question be compared to the Swift Vets by his fellow journalists in the MSM?

Related: Im in ur commentz, debunken ur mechincs!

Meanwhile, in NRO's Corner, Mark Steyn writes:

British schools would rather not teach the Holocaust because too many of their Muslim pupils think it didn't happen. How long will it before American teachers complain that it's difficult to teach 9/11 in class because a small minority of pupils insist on clinging to the discredited and divisive fantasy that it was an attack by foreign terrorists?

Since Senator Edwards is happy to look into whether WTC7 was an inside job, I wonder if he could also investigate whether Bush-Cheney-Rove-Rumsfeld also pulled off Bali, Beslan, Istanbul, Madrid and the London Tube bombings. And where are they hiding the cost of this planet-wide "war on terror" fakery? In the Katrina appropriations?

Elsewhere, Michael Medved notes the cognitive dissonance that intertwines two of the left's favorite memes:

If Bush “knew in advance” about the attacks, for instance, then why did he look so confused and hapless on September 11th? Surely, if they knew the terrorist strikes were coming, his political advisors might have suggested a more Presidential or martial setting for the moment the planes struck the buildings than sitting on an undersized chair and reading “My Pet Goat” to an elementary school classroom in Florida.

Such logical questions may not trouble partisan Democrats in their obsessive rage, but they ought to concern Americans in the middle who haven’t surrendered themselves to nightmarish fantasies.

What happens to the tone and substance of American politics if one of our two great parties not only disagrees with the opposition leaders, but believes they’re guilty of participating in mass murder of innocents Americans?

As Steyn wrote, "If ever there was a perfect time for a Sister Souljah moment, this was it", but then maybe that's why it's called what it is—Candidate Bill Clinton’s rebuttal to Sister Souljah’s hysterics during the ’92 campaign seems to be the one and only time such a thing has occurred on the left in recent memory.