Mitt's Romnesia on Benghazi

You have to wonder how much Mitt Romney is going to want to get in to the whole Benghazi story tomorrow night after his epic fail on that one in the last debate.

Since then, all the news has basically exonerated the Obama administration's story about how the whole thing unfolded. Meanwhile, Rep. Issa's document dump may have endangered the lives of some Libyans who are working with the U.S.

Overall, Republican insistence on trying to make some political hay out of a tragic situation is backfiring on them.

But I'm reminded today of how this whole thing started - with Mitt Romney stepping in to shoot first and aim later. We know that folks in his campaign were on the lookout for a moment they could paint President Obama with the same brush Reagan had painted President Carter on the Iran hostage situation. And so on September 11th - before we even knew that Ambassador Stevens had been killed - Romney released this statement.

I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.

Notice that he didn't use the words "terror attacks?" As a matter of fact, when he suggests that the Obama administration's first response was to "sympathize with those who waged the attacks," he was linking what happened in Benghazi to the protests in Egypt over the infamous video and the unauthorized statement by the Cairo embassy.

And then in his press conference the next day Romney never referred to a terror attack and continued to conflate the protests in Cairo (over the video) with the attack in Benghazi.

I'd suggest that when Mitt attacks President Obama for blaming the Benghazi attack on the video protests, he's displaying a bit of Romnesia with regards to his own statements about it.