Via Think Progress, which enjoys a power to push stories into big-media outlets that righty blogs can only dream of. Ace’s headline for this story says all that really needs to be said. Rest assured, President Romney will be accused of treason by left-wing partisans for reasons various and sundry within, oh, six months of taking office, especially since liberals will by then once again be free to pretend that they’re anti-war and deeply offended by drone strikes and military interventions, etc etc. The punchline here is that even if Mitt had spoken up, the story afterward wouldn’t have been “Romney defends Obama against ‘treason’ charge,” it would have been “‘Treason’ charge highlights divide between Romney and monstrously radical wingnut base.” In fact, I was amused to learn that McCain’s exchange with a townhall questioner in 2008 who accused Obama of being Arab was treated as some big moment of political courage in “Game Change.” As I recall, the media/liberal takeaway from that incident at the time was that the questioner was perfectly emblematic of Republican voters, with McCain’s response more or less an afterthought. We can’t elect Romney because he didn’t say anything today, but even if he had, we can’t elect him because then we’re empowering people like the questioner. See how that works? Good thing there are no partisans on the left, huh?

Three clips for you here. The first is Romney at the townhall. The second, a personal favorite, is of left-wing heartthrob John Edwards — the liberal blogosphere’s preferred candidate circa 2007, do note — humoring a bottom-feeding Truther asking him about World Trade Center Building 7 while on the trail that year. He doesn’t hear the question at first but then the crowd relays it and suddenly he’s plenty agreeable. And third, via Andrew Kaczynski, is Obama flunky Dan Pfeiffer responding to the incident last year in which Teamsters prez James Hoffa said at an Obama event that it was time to “take these [Republican] sons of bitches out.” Oddly enough, Pfeiffer was much more ambivalent about attributing one person’s words to a candidate in that case than the left is being today. Exit question: Which Obama townhall questioner recently referred to the Koch brothers as “contract killers out there in Super PAC land”? Oops, that wasn’t a townhall questioner. It was … David Axelrod.