Mitt Romney cries uncle: I 'respect and admire' President Obama for finally taking out bin Laden

Full availability here. Mitt Romney earlier this afternoon near Ground Zero with Rudy Giuliani at his side, essentially crying uncle:

And this of course is on the anniversary of the day when Osama bin Laden finally was taken out. And we respect and admire the many people who were part of that, from the president who authorized that attack, to the intelligence community who worked on it for so many years to identify where he was and of course to the members of our armed services, particularly SEAL Team Six that took the extraordinary risk of going into Pakistan and removing one of the world's worst characters.

And he swears he would have done the same thing:

QUESTION: Would you have handled things differently with respect to Osama bin Laden?

ROMNEY: Of course I would have ordered taking out Osama bin Laden. Of course, this is a person who had done terrible harm to America and who represented a continuing threat to civilized people throughout the world, and had I been President of the United States, I would have made the same decision the president did, which was to remove him. And I acknowledged a year ago when this was announced that the president deserved credit for the decision he made and I continue to believe that and certainly would have taken that action myself.

As we've repeatedly documented, Mitt Romney is full of it when he says he would have done the same thing as Obama, but that's not something he'll ever admit. Instead, he has been playing for a tie'trying to convince people that he would have done the same thing as Obama. And in his desperate effort to secure that tie, Romney has repeatedly praised President Obama's leadership, with "respect and admire" being the most dramatic example.

That praise'especially the "respect and admire" phrase'undercuts the apocolyptic case Romney had been seeking to make against Obama. Time and time again, Romney has accused Obama of apologizing for America and seeking to transform the United States into Europe. Throughout the primary, he portrayed Barack Obama as someone who at his core is not a true American, and even now he says Obama seeks to divide America for political gain. And yet here he is saying he respects and admires the very same man whom he has so often condemned.

You can't really square Romney's praise with his attacks, so the logical conclusion is that he must have been lying about one or both of them. And given his track record, I'd bet on both.