The clips in the above video come from the 2008 presidential campaign, back when Jim DeMint supported Mitt Romney. Greg Sargent flagged them last March, but they are newly relevant because on Thursday Dave Weigel asked DeMint to explain why he now says Romney must repudiate RomneyCare when he was praising it back in the day.

To put it charitably, DeMint offered Weigel a deeply dishonest explanation. He said:

"I got involved with him before that," DeMint explained, "and the concept that was presented to me was the idea of moving people from government plans to private plans...the way it ended up was not acceptable. I think the more we learn about what Obamacare did with the individual mandates, we realize there are much better ways to do that. The goverment-centric approach is not one I support."

But that's bullshit. RomneyCare was signed into law in April, 2006, well before DeMint endorsed him. And as you can see in the above video, DeMint not only said that RomneyCare was one of the reasons he endorsed Romney, it was in fact something that "we should do for the whole country."

So while he was praising RomneyCare to high heaven back in the 2008 campaign and saying that it should go national, now that it has gone national, DeMint says it should never have gone anywhere outside of Massachusetts:

I still admire him for taking on the task, but I think it's important to recognize that that's not where we want our healthcare to go. States can compete with different plans, but we shouldn't have anything like what they did in Massachusetts at the federal level.

Ezra Klein is right when he calls DeMint's outrage "fake." It's entirely manufactured. There's nothing authentic about it.