Fox News today praised Mitt Romney for adopting their own manufactured attack on President Obama, celebrating Romney “get[ting] a little angry and agitated” about Obama's comment that Fox both distorted and obsessively promoted.

During the July 18 edition of Fox & Friends, co-hosts Steve Doocy, and Gretchen Carlson and guest host Eric Bolling hyped recent remarks made by GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. Echoing the claim made by Fox hosts and guests, Romney claimed that Obama in his July 15 speech “attack[ed] success.” Romney found it “extraordinary that a philosophy of that nature would be spoken by a President of the United States.”

In response, Fox & Friends praised the GOP presidential hopeful for using the talking point crafted by Fox over the last few days. Carlson remarked:

CARLSON: Mitt Romney came back firing yesterday and a lot of people who are backing Mitt Romney were like okay, about time we see Mitt Romney get a little angry and agitated at something that President Obama had said in regard to small businesses and whether or not the government is instrumental in a business person achieving success or if it's the individual aspiration of what many deem to be the American dream.

Continuing to praise Romney as he did yesterday on The Five, Bolling declared that Romney, in his speech, “was a Mitt Romney that we haven't seen before, and frankly it's one that really needs to last the next for months.”

Fox & Friends did not limit themselves to just praise, they also revealed Fox's involvement in delivering to Romney some talking point he employed. Doocy, when introducing a clip of Romney's response to Obama, pointed out that Romney took Obama's comments, and “ran with them.” Of course, the comments to which Romney responded, and the Romney campaign highlighted on its Youtube page, were the same ones pulled out of context by Fox and used as the basis for their obsessive attacks.

In addition to their praise of Romney for adopting Fox News' dishonest attack, Carlson credited herself for a reference made by Romney in his speech. Hours before Romney's speech she equated the selectively edited Obama comments to the exchange between the president and Samuel Wurzelbacher, otherwise known as "Joe the Plumber" in 2008, and suggested that Romney's mentioning of “Joe and his colleagues” stemmed from that. From the broadcast:

CARLSON: Well I think it is interesting, because the way in which he described it was not just the top of the line CEOs who might be offended by this kind of a comment but it was the average Joe. Oh I said Joe. Because remember yesterday I was equating this comment to the President to the “Joe the Plumber” moment in the 2008 campaign. It will be interesting to see whether or not it keeps its legs as it moves forward.