I watched former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer on Anderson Cooper’s show last night, talking about Mitt Romney’s utter #FAIL on the Libya/Egypt crisis, and he really is a Republican. In the way that he’s an utter liar, I mean.

Fleischer said that Romney criticizing Obama in the middle of a foreign policy crisis, that had only started hours before, and in which at least one America was already dead, is just like candidate Obama criticizing candidate McCain who wasn’t president, who wasn’t running American foreign policy, and who wasn’t in the middle of a national security crisis where American lives were at risk. Amazing.

Then Fleischer goes on to say that John Kerry criticized George Bush on Iraq and Afghanistan during the 2004 campaign – two ongoing wars that Bush started and that were a disaster – and Fleischer said that that is the same thing as Romney commenting on the Egypt/Libya crisis only hours after it began, when we had no idea what was going on, other than that Americans were dead.

No, Ari, it’s not the same thing.

You’re just a liar, like most of your party leadership, and the natural thing for you to do is, well, lie and just assume that no one will notice. Well, we noticed.

We’re not idiots, Ari. I know you assume a lot of your voters are. But we’re not. There’s a difference between undercutting the President only hours into a deadly national security crisis, and criticizing a war that’s been going on for years.

Americans expect a presidential candidate to offer his views on an ongoing war. They do not expect a presidential candidate to jump on a podium, with bunting and flags intended to make it look like he’s speaking to the nation as president from the White House (yeah, we noticed), and start offering his opinions, and undermining the President, on a crisis that’s just started, and about which the candidate has no idea what was even going on.

I’m surprised Romney didn’t grab the mic and declare himself in charge of the entire federal government, a la Al Haig.

At that moment in time, when American lives were on the line in Libya and Egypt, no one in America gave a damn about what Mitt Romney was thinking. But there he was, smirking like an idiot, getting his facts wrong, and treating the death of an American diplomat as “an opportunity.”

Not very presidential. But oh so Republican.