MoveOn Hits Mitt Romney On Libya Response

Progressive group MoveOn.org will run a full-page ad this week criticizing GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney for his response to the killing of four Americans in Libya last week, pointing to five newspaper editorials that call his statements "vile," "profoundly inappropriate" and "beyond the pale."

The ad, which will run in New Hampshire and Virginia newspapers, features a picture of Romney from a press conference Wednesday, where he reiterated claims that the president mismanaged the situation in Libya leading up to the attack on an American embassy there. Above that image, the ad reads, "Fit to Lead?"

On Tuesday, the Romney campaign denounced President Barack Obama's response to the attack as "sympath[izing] with those who waged the attacks," referring to a statement put out by the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which didn't include an apology and was released before the facility in Libya was breached.

The next day, when more information was available -- including the news that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other embassy staffers had been killed -- Romney continued to argue along those lines, saying the Egypt embassy's statement was "akin to apology" and the Obama administration as a whole was responsible.

Romney's response was widely condemned, as the MoveOn.org as points out. The New York Times wrote Wednesday that Romney "showed an extraordinary lack of presidential character by using the murders of the Americans in Libya as an excuse not just to attack Mr. Obama, but to do so in a way that suggested either a dangerous ignorance of the facts or an equally dangerous willingness to twist them to his narrow partisan aims."

The ad also quotes the Miami Herald, The Virginian-Pilot, The News & Observer and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

View the full ad.