Steve Benen and Greg Sargent are trying to goad the press into confronting Mitt Romney about his campaign of complete falsehood. Today, the issue is the ads Romney is running that falsely accuse the president of stripping the work requirement out of Welfare Reform. Romney’s actually telling this lie on the stump, too. But the Welfare work requirement is actually a bit peripheral compared to the $716 billion lie that Romney and the Republicans have been telling about Medicare.

Benen makes a good point that if Obama’s presidency has really been so bad, it should be easy to attack him with truthful statements. So, why are the two biggest points of attack we are seeing right now based on complete lies?

It’s no wonder that the president can’t stand Romney:

It is Romney himself who provides a rallying point for both the candidate and his team.

Obama really doesn’t like, admire or even grudgingly respect Romney. It’s a level of contempt, say aides, he doesn’t even feel for the conservative, combative House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most. “There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought he was an honorable man and a war hero,” a longtime Obama adviser said. “That doesn’t hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.” Time and again Obama has told the people around him that Romney stood for “nothing.” The word he would use to describe Romney was “weak,” too weak to stand up to his own moneymen, too weak to defend his own moderate record as the man who signed into law the first health insurance mandate as Massachusetts governor in 2006, too weak to admit Obama had done a single thing right as president.

Maybe Romney is weak. But I know for certain that his arguments are weak.

So, how should the press deal with this complete departure from reality?