Romney's campaign lie

Steve Benen piles on Romney's "Obama apologised for America" line. Daniel Larison, of the American Conservative, seconds:

I realized that this rhetoric about apologies and other conservatives’ charges that Obama didn’t believe in American exceptionalism were never meant to refer to anything that Obama had actually done. Instead, they were opportunities for the people making these charges to wrap themselves in the mantle of American nationalism, define belief in American exceptionalism in such a way that it could only apply to people who agreed with them, and to impute anti-Americanism to anyone else. The entire exercise is clearly fraudulent, but it is also one that many Republicans find quite satisfying.

Agreed. It's one thing to criticize a president's foreign policy, it's quite another to assert – I might add, in the absence of any evidentiary substance – that a president is of an anti-American nature. Make no mistake: this is exactly the kind of image Romney and many of his colleagues in the current GOP stable wish to make of the president, and for good reason – it appeals rather nicely to the vapid audiences that unfailingly frequent their debates. The truly worrying fact in all of this is that Romney is actually one of the more appealing candidates in the GOP race at the moment (or, at least, he strikes me as the most 'presidential', whatever that means).

It's amusing how Romney attempts to pull the 'substance over rhetoric' argument, given that he's one of the worst offenders; that charge, nestled in amongst all the other catchphrases like 'Believe in America', preceded by a comparison between Obama and Marie Antoinette. (By the way, I don't mean to be pedantic, but I think we're all aware she didn't say "let them eat cake." C'mon. You're turning into Bachmann.) Tell us what you're actually going to do now. We're listening.