I hadn't seen that image yet, just people claiming it was a handkerchief in comment threads. So it's technically "cheating" insofar as he wasn't supposed to have anything with him, but it's not cheating in any meaningful sense of the word. Good to know.


I watched the whole debate and never once saw him use it.

This is Bush and the wireless receiver all over again. These people should really stop spending hours analysing blurry pixels and go outside and play with their kids.

Yeah, when I first saw it I didn't think it was that unbelievable he'd have the gall to cheat, and had no idea why he'd be whipping out a handkerchief onto the podium, but apparently that's what he was doing.

Though if "tangible things" is really one of the rules he did break it, you're right. But still it's a distraction from all the other myriad horrible things about Romney we should be drilling into our friends and family's heads.

Of course there are people now insisting it's too stiff for a handkerchief and he must have had index cards hidden inside it, because god forbid they be wrong.

He is an odd man.

The point is that, had he done that, he would have violated the rules of the debate to which he agreed to before hand.

True, but the larger point of a debate is to present facts that support one's case and/or undercut the other guy's, and the implication there is that debaters have to be committed to the truth. Romney fails at that most basic level; all in all I would have been relatively thrilled if he'd prepared a secret crib sheet and used it to present accurate information.

Except for Fox News, The New York Post, The Drudge Report, etc but yeah no one complained about that.

The allowance of notes must have been allowed in the terms of the debate that both candidates agreed to, which is apparently wasn't this time around (it usually isn't). So this would have been a big problem for him if it had been real.