Much is being made by the left and what remains of the dwindling anti-Romney right by a post from the far left website Think Progress that headlines: “Top Romney Adviser Says Romney Can Change His Positions After The Primaries: ‘It’s Almost Like An Etch A Sketch’”.

Unsurprisingly, the post by Alex Seitz-Wald is a fabrication. Somewhat surprisingly, though certainly unfortunate: many on the right are blindly following it.

The claim in the headline is no where to be found in the video clip of the exchange. Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom answered a question on CNN about the tone of the primary and how its conservative focus might hurt Romney in a general election with a historically undeniably accurate answer: after a nominee is chosen, everything changes. The tone, the issues, the focus – it all gets a reboot.

HOST: Is there a concern that Santorum and Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election?

FEHRNSTROM: Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

Couldn’t be more clear… or accurate. Fehrnstrom did not call Mitt Romney an Etch A Sketch. He did not call his political ideology Etch A Sketchy. He made an accurate analogy about the 2 campaigns within an election: the 2012 election is the childs toy, the primary is the first sketch – shake it up – and the general election is the 2nd sketch. It’s a visual in response to the question that the competition among Romneys former primary opponents will carry over to do him harm in the general election. This isn’t a complex or nuanced piece of imagery to comprehend… so why is anyone calling Mitt Romney an Etch A Sketch?

Fehrnstrom never said nor implied that Romneys positions would be the thing that change. ThinkProgress just saw a “flip-flop” opening with the “Etch A Sketch” analogy and went for it with their usual standards of intellectual honesty (see: little to none).

For further debunking of the claim that anyone close to Romney even hinted at (let alone quoted Romney or gave any actual insider-strategy plan revelations on), one needs only to keep listening to the sentences directly following the one with the analogy. The context Fehrnstrom is making these remarks in is crystal clear: Romney

But what are those on the right’s excuse for touting this left wing attack? Ignorance? Granted, the research required to debunk this smear is extensive (you have to watch the 30 seconds of video), so perhaps it’s understandable that people like Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and others who do not want to see Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee would fall for this.

What does it say about a candidate or pundit that jumps on the smears put out by the opposition instead of debunk them? It says that they are selfish, destructive to the ideology and desperate to find something.

In other news: Ohio Art, the maker of the popular toy’s, stock was up more than 200 percent on Thursday and sales on Amazon jumped 1,556%…