MITT ROMNEY: LYING HOSER

Mark Halperin has excerpts from Mitt Romney's upcoming speech at CPAC. I see Romney's going to say this:

President Barack Obama has stood watch over the greatest job loss in modern American history. And that, my friends, is one inconvenient truth that will haunt this President throughout history. Today there are more men and women out of work in America than there are people working in Canada. And in the month of January, Canada created more new jobs than we did.

Gosh, why would Canada be experiencing a stronger economic recovery than America. Could it be ... a less sociopathic banking system and better government regulation?

...Mindful of government oversight, Canadian banks by and large avoided the structured debt products that imperiled many of their American counterparts. They also maintained comparatively tight controls on mortgage lending to consumers. When zero percent down payments on mortgages were widely available in the United States, Canadians were typically required to put down at least 10 percent. American-style amortization periods stretching beyond 25 years were also relatively unknown in Canada.

"In Canada, standards got nowhere near as low," said Timothy D. Hockey, the chief executive of TD Canada Trust, Toronto-Dominion’s Canadian retail banking operation. "When the crisis came upon us, the standards didn’t have to change." ...

"One of the things we see in American businesses that we don't see in our Canadian businesses is a willingness to really push the limits," said Mr. Soper, whose operations include Royal LePage, one of Canada's leading real estate brokers. "When bubbles burst, sometimes the turtle wins."

With perhaps, a healthy dose of big government?

Canadians have benefited from fiscal stimulus (government spending) and monetary stimulus (low interest rates) since the downturn in 2008. "Most of our stimulus was in the form of infrastructure spending," said Antunes. "There was a lot of concern that it wouldn't get out there fast enough. But it seems as though it did the job."

Antunes is Pedro Antunes, author of a report for the Conference Board of Canada on the nation's economic outlook.

More from Mitt:

Under the pressure of a crisis, people turn to what they really believe. With our economy in crisis, the President and his fellow liberals turned to Europe for their answers. Like the Europeans, they grew the government, they racked up bigger deficits....

Or like, er, Canada. I mentioned the infrastructure spending. Did I also mention the industry bailouts, extension of unemployment and other benefits to workers, and buybacks of bad debt from banks?

I don't know how America can continue to function as a nation when virtually every member of one of our political parties regularly deceives the public this shamelessly about simple facts. Canada didn't recover faster because it's a Randian paradise -- Canada recovered because it had enough regulations in place to prevent the worst excesses and because it then did the right amount of government intervention (while the U.S. didn't do nearly enough). Romney knows all that -- but he'll do everything in his power to make sure the rubes never do.