Noting the right-wing conspiracies about President Barack Obama and his administration, liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said Mitt Romney’s performance at the second presidential debate revealed he had succumb to conspiratorial thinking as well.

“That impulse on the right now to not just downplay or distract from or try and explain away from things they didn’t like, like people have always done in politics,” Maddow said.

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“The impulse not to do that normal stuff, but to assert that uncomfortable facts just aren’t real facts, that the president isn’t really president, that the unemployment rate hasn’t really gone down, that closed loop, cuddle yourself, pretend it isn’t happening impulse, that is what made the right’s presidential candidate last night walk into this horrible wall.”

During the debate, Romney said that Obama had not referred to recent attacks on Americans in Libya as terrorism. But Obama noted he said it was an “act of terror” the day after the attack. Unconvinced, Romney asserted that Obama had waited 14 days before describing it as an act of terror, only to be corrected by moderator Candy Crowley.

Maddow said the false narrative that Obama refused to call the attacks an act of terror was comforting to conservatives who believed the President had a weak foreign policy.

“Mitt Romney getting it wrong last night because he apishly consumes the right wing version of reality instead of the real reality,” Maddow said, “that was the story of the night.”

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

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