I love this item from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler. Romney says that Obama is going around the world apologizing for America. The headline: “Romney’s claim that Obama is an apologist for U.S. is based on distortions.”
Indeed!
An apologist is someone who zealously defends something, not someone who apologizes for its failures. An “apologist for America” is what the president largely should be, and it is most certainly not what Romney is calling him. At first I thought Kessler might be a victim of his headline writer. Happens all the time. But no. From the piece:
Romney likes to say that President Obama apologized overseas for the United States. He even titled his campaign book “No Apology.”
Even more, Romney suggests, Obama does not believe in American strength and greatness. The assertion feeds into a subterranean narrative that Obama, with his exotic, mixed-race background, is not really American in the first place.
The claim that Obama is an apologist for the nation began to take shape shortly after he became president. It had been bubbling in the conservative blogs before Karl Rove, who was George W. Bush’s political adviser, had an article titled “The President’s Apology Tour” published in the Wall Street Journal on April 23, 2009, just three months after Obama took the oath of office.
Update: Woops sorry. Added link above.