Karl Rove reiterates Mitt Romney's phony claims he would have ordered taking out Osama bin Laden

Calling President Obama a narcissist, Karl Rove, the father of overreach and overdo, has joined Republican caterwauling that the Obama campaign team and the president himself have overreached by politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden by saying Mitt Romney wouldn't have ordered the Seal Team assault on the terrorist leader's hideout.

Not true, Rove says, repeating the penny-ante dog-whistling that Republicans and Romney himself have been claiming that "even" Jimmy Carter would have ordered the assault. You can see right there that Rove, even though he doesn't have a non-partisan molecule in his body, would never politicize anything as important as national security.

Rove is a professor of long standing in the School of Telling Lies Frequently Enough to Convince Everybody They're True. As noted several times by my colleague Jed Lewison, it's a Republican lie that any president would have done what Obama did. To give the order taking out bin Laden, a Republican president would first have had to pursue a policy directed at finding him. That is something that Romney (and George W. Bush) and John McCain all made clear they weren't very interested in doing.

To give the former president a smidgen of credit, if Bush had stumbled across bin Laden, he probably would have ordered an assault. But not Romney. He said in his previous campaign for the presidency that his policy would be not to go into Pakistan after al Qaeda targets. At least not without consulting Pakistani leaders first. He didn't specifically mention bin Laden, but surely there could be no bigger al Qaeda target than that.

Without the policy to back it up, no way could the assault be ordered. And if he had consulted America's supposed Pakistani allies ahead of time on the matter, Osama bin Laden would today be eating hummus and watching television in a compound in Somalia or Yemen or one of a dozen other places.

So the Obama team is absolutely spot-on with their claims. Nothing Romney has since said about agreeing with and admiring Obama's decision in the matter changes that fact. As president, he would have gone down a path that kept Osama alive.

Rove is never happy with offering only one lie, of course. I guess it's an economies of scale kind of thing. Why waste paper or pixels when the lies can be bundled? So, in addition to claims that Romney would have done what Obama and "even" Jimmy Carter would have done, Rove says that Republicans never engage in politicizing matters of national security. In terms of the 9/11 attacks, their approach has been, he writes, to present "simple, positive statements and images." It's the infernally partisan Democrats who make a political issue out of them.

Karl Rove proves once again that he is the King of Upsidedownism.