Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer has a few words of advice from anyone who was taken aback by Mitt Romney's embrace of birtherism earlier today in Michigan: you need to learn how to take a joke. "Look," said Spicer. "It's a light-hearted moment. He was stating a fact. He's proud of the fact that we was born in Michigan." According to Spicer, anyone who says Romney's comment was "anything more than that is taking it a little bit too far."

So if you thought Mitt Romney was suggesting something about President Obama when he boasted that "no one has ever asked to see my birth certificate" because "they know that this is the place that we were born and raised," you just don't have Mitt's vibrant sense of humor. If you thought he was speaking directly to Donald Trump and Orly Taitz and Rush Limbaugh, you just can't take a joke. Because Romney was just being a comedian. Har, har! We must all guffaw uproariously in unison at Mr. Romney's comic stylings.

You know what this defense of Romney reminds me of? It reminds me of how one of his buddy's at Cranbrook defended him from the Washington Post's report on his days as a high school bully:



My suspicion is that they jokingly said 'Hey, let's go cut his hair.' And went down the hall, and you know, you hold the scissors close to his ear, and you make a lot of snipping sounds, and you may traumatize the guy a little, or scare the guy a little, but no harm, no foul.

If that's Mitt Romney's idea of a joke, then maybe he was joking today, but that doesn't make him a funny guy. And being the same kind of guy today that he was in high school isn't something for him to be bragging about.