The folks at the Romney campaign, and their PR reps at Fox News, must have been pleased with the phony controversy they created by deceitfully editing President Obama’s remarks. Their dishonest portrayal of the President as dismissive of the efforts of business developers successfully exploited the short attention spans of many media pundits while simultaneously stimulating the drool glands of conservative dittoheads.

So satisfied with their reality distortion, they are already testing a new iteration on the Fox Nation web site: “Obama: Our Union Isn’t Perfect”

Consistent with their modus operandi, the Fox Nationalists have excerpted an out-of-context snippet from a speech Obama delivered to the National Urban League. The rhetorical surgery creates a deliberately false impression of the President’s views. In this case, the intent is to malign Obama for insulting America which, of course, he never did. Here is a more complete segment of Obama’s remarks where he was recalling his work on behalf of low-income families in Chicago:

“I confess the progress didn’t come quickly, and it did not come easily. Sometimes it didn’t come at all. There were times where I thought about giving up and moving on. But what kept me going day in and day out was the same thing that has sustained the Urban League all these years. The same thing that sustains all of you. And that is the belief that in America, change is always possible. That our union may not be perfect, but it is perfectible. That we can strive over time, through effort and sweat and blood and tears until it is the place we imagine. It may come in fits and starts, at a pace that can be slow and frustrating, but if we are willing to push through all the doubt and the cynicism and the weariness, then yes, we can form that more perfect union.”

The far-right wingnuts who manage to squeeze something derogatory out of these words are fundamentally dim-witted. They are the sort of patriopathic zealots who can’t comprehend that nothing, including America, is perfect. And despite their glassy-eyed flag-lust, they are not even aware that it was our founders who set the nation on a course to perfect the union. They even wrote it into the Constitution.

Obama’s speech was an indisputably positive expression of the limitless scope of opportunity that America represents. It was an affirmation of our nation’s unique ability to grow and to heal despite all obstacles. Yet the gloomsayers at Fox managed to dial up their pessimism and animus and extract something so utterly contrary that it bears no resemblance to the meaning intended by the President.

It is that ability to detour so sharply from the obvious that makes Fox Nation such a productive factory of falsehoods. And it should surprise no one if this warped wording becomes the subject of Mitt Romney’s next lie-riddled advertisement. After all, Fox is the testing grounds for Romney’s campaign of manufactured outrage. You might call it his hissy fitness center.

Check out Jon Stewart’s brilliant take on the subject: