Two items said by Mitt Romney, right in a row, have been receiving a bit of attention.  Interestingly enough, they were said one after another.

Governor Romney, I wanted to start by asking you a question on which every American has formed an opinion.

MITT ROMNEY, FORMER GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS: Well, the question is, kind of, a non sequitur, if you will. What I mean by that — or a null set — that is that if you’re saying let’s turn back the clock and Saddam Hussein had opening up his country to IAEA inspectors and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn’t be in the conflict we’re in.

OR Okay.  Try this again.:  Kind of a non sequitur, if you will.  What I mean by that is a null set.  The transcript and the words that I heard on various replays do not exactly match.
What is it a null set?  In mathematics, a null set is a set that is negligible in some sense. For different applications, the meaning of “negligible” varies. In set theory, there is only one null set, and it is the empty set. In measure theory, any set of measure 0 is called a null set. Mitt Romney is saying, I guess, that the question is invalid.

The audience watching is all gaping “Huh?”  I just the other day posted rumblings from a Washington Monthly plastering Democrats for trying to speak over the publics’ heads.  I read another article that posited that Al Gore, with his new book, has picked that habit up full-steam — chastising the public for its television viewing habits and on.  Al Gore, of course, can afford to because he is not running for president — which solves the problem that particular article had with what they saw as Al Gore’s presidential campaign.

Mitt Romney, by tossing out the word “null set” had an Adlai Stevenson moment … of sorts.  I am not entirely sure his use of the word makes sense, which leads to explanation number two for “null set”:

Try this:
Kind of a non sequitur, if you will.  What I mean by that is a Vinn Diagram.
Kind of a non sequitur, if you will.  What I mean by that is a Venetian Blind.
Kind of a non sequitur, if you will.  What I mean by that is Fish.
See how that works?  Mitt Romney is explaining the definition of “non sequitur” by use of an example.  That leads to a paradox, which is that it is no longer a non sequitur because  the example is an example and thus not a non sequitur, but you already read that Shannon Wheeler cartoon, and thus we start a feedback loop not dissimilar to the time travel paradoxes used in science fiction films.

The second part of this statement receiving some attention — Paul Krugman wrote on it — is that Mitt Romney’s assertion that Saddam Hussein kicked out the IAEA Inspectors is simply incorrect.  The basic problem is that this narrative is generally accepted as true in the media and by the Political Establishment, false though it is, and to call him on it is to cave in to unorthodoxical Truth — thus Wolf Blitzer ends up an idealouge by the terms set down by establishment politics.

And what I mean by that is a null set.

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