A Republican presidential candidate can never go wrong by whining that he’s being persecuted by the liberal media, and Mitt Romney is taking refuge in this hoary old saw yet again: Romney on Gaffes: It’s the Media’s Fault.

Asked about his missteps in an interview with Fox News’ Carl Cameron before he left Poland on Tuesday, Romney accused reporters of trivializing the substance of his trip and trying to divert attention from President Obama’s stewardship of the economy.

“And I realize that there will be some in the Fourth Estate, or whichever estate, who are far more interested in finding something to write about that is unrelated to the economy, to geopolitics, to the threat of war, to the reality of conflict in Afghanistan today, to a nuclearization of Iran,” Romney said, according to a transcript of the interview that aired on Tuesday morning. “They’ll instead try and find anything else to divert from the fact that these last four years have been tough years for our country.”

Wait … the media are trying to divert people’s attention away from the bad economy?

Really? Then why are there articles and news reports and editorials and polls and graphs about the bad economy every single day in every newspaper and on every cable news channel in the United States?

This is just crazy. Romney’s not even trying to describe the real world; it’s nothing but a red meat persecution fantasy for the right wing base.