Really? This from the campaign team that openly queried whether Mitt Romney may-or-may-not be a felon?

“Launching a false attack”? “That’s not what he said”? Er, I’m pretty sure Romney was reading directly from a transcript of Obama’s now-infamous remarks, and sorry if you don’t like his analysis — but this just looks like a wildly desperate effort to re-brand what’s shaping up to be the gaffe of the year. President Obama really stepped in it with that one, and Team Obama knows it. The liberal media rushed to their man-crush’s defense, saying that conservatives are “taking Obama’s comments out of context” or that “actually, Mitt Romney and President Obama fundamentally agree,” but their flailing can’t walk back Obama’s woeful mistake.

Mitt Romney believes in the power of individual ingenuity, free enterprise, and competition; Barack Obama believes in the collective, the state, and socialization. Yes, plenty of people work long hours at difficult jobs, and we all pay taxes for the infrastructure and justice system that mean we can reliably conduct business with one another; but as Charles Krauthammer points out, those are constant variables, not the roots of success.

…The greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.

Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.

Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he created the Mac and the iPad.

Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.