While grasping for justifications to explain his mysterious absence from Bain Capital, Mitt Romney has proven once again that reality surpasses satire.

Romney spent Friday afternoon in a peculiar sort of speed-dating ritual with the media, giving five short interviews to five networks all asking the same question: Were you, or were you not, running the company that you said you were running? It apparently was insufficient to quell the controversy because today Romney sent his surrogates around to the Sunday news programs to tell the same story. And what a story it was.

Top campaign adviser Ed Gillespie took the lead. But during his segment with David Gregory of Meet the Press, Gillespie may have helped to erase the memory of the Etch-a-Sketch debacle launched by another Romney adviser a few weeks ago:

GREGORY: He was still financially linked to Bain. And of course, a lot his fortune is due to his time with Bain. Even when he was on leave, does he stand by the business decisions that were made by the firm he created?

That’s actually a good question. While much of the press has been focused on whether or not Romney maintained an active role at Bain from 1999 to 2002, the years when many controversial activities resulted in shuttered factories and jobs exported overseas, no one has yet asked whether Romney approved of the decisions that were made by the people he says he left behind to run his business. But Gillespie dodged the question and instead dropped this nugget that will very likely make him famous:

GILLESPIE: He actually retired retroactively at that point. He ended up not going back to the firm after his time in Salt Lake City. So he was actually retired from Bain.

Retired retroactively? You can do that? Needless to say, that tortured phraseology quickly became a trending topic on Twitter. A couple of my own contributions:

#JohnMcCain retired #retroactively from the 2008 campaign. Claims no responsibility for #SarahPalin.

— News Corpse (@NewsCorpse) July 15, 2012

I #retroactively married Zooey Deschanel. She doesn't know yet. She'll be surprised when I show up tonight with all my stuff.

— News Corpse (@NewsCorpse) July 15, 2012

And lest anyone think that Gillespie misspoke, he repeated almost verbatim the same excuse when he appeared on CNN’s State of the Nation with Candy Crowley:

GILLESPIE: He took a leave of absence and in fact, Candy, ended up not going back at all and retired retroactively to February 1999 as a result.

So there you have it. Despite all of the evidence that Romney was still in charge of Bain while he was supposedly working at the Olympics, he was actually retired. It’s just that neither he, nor anyone else, knew it at the time.

We still haven’t got an answer as to whether he approved of the direction Bain had taken in his “absence,” but he is sure running away from it as though there were something about it for which he would be sorely ashamed. We also don’t know whether he retroactively reimbursed Bain for the hundreds of thousands of dollars he collected in salary during the time he was retroactively retired.

I sure wish I could not show up for work for three years, collect a hefty paycheck the whole time, then tell them I decided not to come back. But I guess that’s the difference between people like Romney and the rest of us. The privileged classes get to make up their own rules, and when those don’t suffice, they just make up new ones. Sweet!