Mitt Romney is a broken record:

He has bowed to foreign dictators. And when the opportunity arose to defend freedom, he’s either been late to the game or failed to show up at all.

President Obama rushed to apologize for America, but he has hesitated to speak up for democracy and freedom.

I’m not interested in going through all of the falsehoods in Romney’s RJC speech. We have gone over them many times before, and Romney is going to keep repeating these falsehoods no matter what anyone says. What should give everyone pause is the role that Romney believes that Presidents should fill. He apparently believes that Presidents are obliged to “defend freedom” everywhere, which is such a huge responsibility that no one could escape being accused of failure. Indeed, should Romney win next year’s election there is no way that he can live up to the standard that he is setting in this speech.

Something else notable in the speech is the extent of Romney’s pandering. Romney panders almost all of the time, but it is remarkable that Romney is so insistent on maintaining the fiction that Obama is insufficiently “pro-Israel” that he has pledged to make Israel the destination of his first foreign trip as President. If he followed through on this pledge, it would be an unprecedented example of pandering to hawks in his party and to Israel itself. Along the same lines, Romney’s usual rhetoric about Ahmadinejad makes less sense with every passing year. He started calling for Ahmadinejad’s indictment under the Genocide Convention several years ago, and he’s still reciting this line at a time when Ahmadinejad is weaker at home and on his way out. It doesn’t seem to matter to Romney that Ahmadinejad has not actually engaged in “direct and public incitement to commit genocide.” It does tell us something about him that Romney would throw around such a loaded, serious charge simply to score some points with supporters here in the U.S.