President Barack Obama clenches his jaw during the third presidential debate with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., on Oct. 22, 2012.
During the presidential campaign, Romney regularly accused the President of kowtowing to foreign leaders. The GOP candidate didn’t invent this falsehood. A headline on a 2009 Karl Rove column in the Wall Street Journal, which bemoaned Obama’s acknowledgement of U.S. missteps abroad, was among the first to coin the “APOLOGY TOUR” canard; scores of GOP politicians later latched onto it. But Romney seized the dishonest meme and ran with it, penning a policy tome whose title, “No Apology,” was a shot at the President, and lacing speeches with references to the phantom grovel-fest. The problem: as legions of independent fact-checkers documented, the apology tour never happened.
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