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Mitt Romney’s campaign is hoping to distract voters from the growing drum beat of conservatives calling on the former Bain Capital executive to release his tax returns by smearing President Obama as a foreigner, in a not-so-subtle effort to revive the right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding his birthplace.

Indeed, the Romney team, and even Romney himself, spent all of Tuesday painting the president as not a “real” American. Here is a timeline of the campaign’s orchestrated smear:

11:00 AM — OBAMA IS ‘SMOKING SOMETHING,’ GREW UP IN INDONESIA: Obama “has no idea how the American system functions, and we shouldn’t be surprised about that, because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia, and, frankly, when he came to the U.S. he worked as a community organizer, which is a socialized structure, and then got into politics in Chicago.” [Co-chair John Sununu, Fox News]

11:30 AM — OBAMA HAS TO ‘LEARN HOW TO BE AN AMERICAN’: “The men and women all over America who have worked hard to build these businesses, their businesses, from the ground up is how our economy became the envy of the world. It is the American way. And I wish this president would learn how to be an American. [Co-chair John Sununu, Romney campaign conference call]

11:30 AM — OBAMA’S AMERICA IS ‘SOCIALISM’: “It seems to me that the Obama America, there’s no risk but there’s plenty of reward. That’s called socialism to me. In the small business America, there’s a lot of risk, and a chance of reward, and that’s called capitalism, and that’s what made the United States the greatest nation on the face of the earth.” [Businessman Kyle Koehler, Romney campaign conference call]

1:35 PM — ROMNEY SAYS OBAMA’S POLICIES ARE ‘EXTRAORDINARILY FOREIGN’: “Celebrating success instead of attacking it and denigrating making America strong. That’s the right course for the country. His course is extraordinarily foreign.” [Mitt Romney, Pennsylvania]

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Standing before hundreds of supporters in a sweltering oil and natural gas services company outside Pittsburgh, Romney compared Obama's administration to those in foreign lands where the well-connected receive government handouts while the middle-class suffers.
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Romney accused the president of advocating a political philosophy that the Republican said wants Americans to be ashamed of their achievements. "The course we're on right now is foreign to us. It changes America," Romney said. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-campaign-2
0120718,0,7508037.story

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