In a fascinating twist, the Romney camp has switched from attacking President Obama for apologizing and sympathizing with those who attacked American embassies — which was patently untrue — to simply blaming Obama for the attacks themselves and hypothesizing that an Imaginary President Romney would have prevented those attacks:

A top foreign policy aide to Mitt Romney suggested Thursday that the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens would never have happened if Romney were president. There wouldn’t even be anti-American protests in the Middle East if Romney were in charge, the aide said.

“There’s a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation,” Romney adviser Richard Williamson told the Washington Post. “For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we’ve had an American ambassador assassinated.”

He blamed the attack that killed Stevens on Obama’s handling of the region, arguing that the Muslim world would have held the hypothetical Romney administration of 2008-2012 in much greater esteem, which would have prevented violent protests over an anti-Muslim film like the one that led to Stevens’s death.

“In Egypt and Libya and Yemen, again demonstrations — the respect for America has gone down, there’s not a sense of American resolve and we can’t even protect sovereign American property,” he said.

“If only Mitt Romney could be our president right now so that nothing bad would ever happen to America.”

“Why wouldn’t anything bad ever happen?”

“Because of respect and resolve and other good things that Mitt Romney always does and Barack Obama never does. And no apologies. And America.”

So … if you have some free time on your hands right now, feel free to contribute to Richard Williamson’s list of all the bad things that Imaginary President Romney would have prevented: