Who had the worst week in Washington with the Middle East in flames? Mitt Romney, of course

With less than eight weeks before voters do their thing, you can’t waste a day — much less a week. Yet, that’s exactly what former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney did with a series of head-scratching policy and process moves that had people talking about everything but President Obama and his handling of the economy.

It began on Monday when the Romney campaign issued a memo from its pollster Neil Newhouse — who, by the way, is among the most respected numbers guys in either party — that sought to beat back the idea that Obama’s convention bounce was anything more than ephemeral. The memo felt thin and defensive, an attempt to push back against a story line that the campaign was insisting didn’t exist.

That was nothing, of course, next to what happened Wednesday morning, when Romney blasted the Obama administration for a statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo that, the Republican nominee argued, amounted to America apologizing to the rest of the world. The statement, which condemned “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims,” was issued before protesters stormed the embassy, not afterward. The Obama administration did everything it could to distance itself from the statement, insisting it had no idea it was being sent.