You know your big speech on President Obama's "prairie fire" of a national debt is a bust if even the Associated Press feels the need to do a step-by-step fisking of all the lies in it:

ROMNEY: "America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined."

THE FACTS. Hardly. Presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush ran the national debt up to $10.62 trillion, the amount it was on the day Obama took office. Today, it is $15.67 trillion, according to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt. So it has gone up by $5.05 trillion under Obama. That's roughly half of the amount amassed by all the other presidents combined.

In short, the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.

There's much more. Every politician stretches the truth a little, but Mitt Romney out-and-out lies repeatedly. And there's no way to call him on those lies directly, because he doesn't make himself available to reporters. This morning, Romney campaign staffers were physically preventing reporters from taking places at the rope line at an event so they could ask questions of him. Is this the Romney campaign strategy? Lie as much as possible and keep the hell away from reporters so you don't get called on it?