Hmmm. According to Greg Sargent's new exclusive at Election Central, this isn't the first time that Mitt Romney's given the thumbs down to putting a Muslim in a Romney cabinet. I'm not sure having a no-Muslims in the cabinet policy is going to hurt Romney a lot in the GOP primaries. What's equally interesting though is his new or rather his original explanation.

As you know, yesterday a Muslim businessman named Mansoor Ijaz wrote a column in the Christian Science Monitor in which he claimed that Romney had told him that he wouldn't appoint a Muslim to his cabinet because there aren't enough Muslims in the US to merit a cabinet post -- sort of a cartoonish caricature of interest group liberalism.

Well, Greg followed up with Ijaz today. Despite Romney's denials, Ijaz stuck by his story. And he further said that he'd come to ask Romney the question because of what he'd heard from two Nevada Republicans. According to Ijaz, a former state finance director of the Nevada GOP, Irma Aguirre, and the acting state finance chair, George Harris, had been at another fundraiser when Harris asked Romney whether he'd appoint a Muslim to his cabinet. Romney said he didn't think he would. But this time too few Muslims wasn't his rationale. Aguirre remembers Romney saying, "They're radical. There's no talking to them. There's no negotiating with them."

In other words, on the first pass, it was they're all crazy radicals and terrorists. It was this answer that prompted Ijaz to ask his question when he gave the quotas answer.

Greg contacted Aguirre and Harris, both of whom confirmed what Ijaz told him about the question that got things rolling.

So it would seem that Romney managed to give two distinct statements, both of which are pretty offensive and he then fibbed about having said either.

Read Greg's whole report here.

We're still waiting for comment from the Romney campaign.