President Obama’s memory of his mid-August 2012 news conference isn’t great, as he sought today to “reframe” the whole red line on Syria conceit by insisting he’d never come up with it, and that it was actually “the world” who said that.

The world, for what it’s worth, never issued any such statement, but President Obama definitely did, terming chemical weapons use “a red line for us” in the conference, which was just one of many speeches in which he threatened Assad over last summer.

The point of all of this, from President Obama’s perspective, is selling the attack on Syria as something that the whole planet collectively obliged themselves into, as opposed to the truth of it being something President Obama manufactured on his own, and is now claiming was crossed on the basis of dubious, circumstantial evidence.

Ultimately it’s just one part of a multi-faceted effort to con the American public into a war that polls have repeatedly shown they just don’t want. This includes hostile rhetoric, phony claims of “proof,” and repeated references to the Holocaust.

Visiting Sweden today, President Obama couldn’t help but make a quick visit to a synagogue with a Holocaust memorial on the wall, and shamelessly likened his own efforts to attack Syria with the efforts by people to save victims from the concentration camps.