The United States economy was terrifyingly close to the brink of collapse in 2008 and 2009, with the imminent collapse of auto giants General Motors and Chrysler threatening to be the final push over the edge.

When those giants of employment pleaded with the federal government to save them from financial disaster, then President George W. Bush (43) and later President Barack Obama ignored emphatic Republican party objections to saving the auto industry, and so saved that emblematic American industry as well as the nation from an even deeper crash that would take generations to recover from.

Four years later,  according to the nonpartisan Center for Automotive Research, there are 1.45 million people who have jobs as a direct result of the $80 billion bailout, both at the auto makers and the associated downstream businesses. Michigan’s unemployment level is now at its lowest level in three years.  GM is again the world’s biggest automaker, and both General Motors and Chrysler are reporting substantial profits.

Yet Mitt Romney and the other Republican presidential candidates, spent the days before the Michigan primary denouncing the bailout that has rescued the state and the nation’s economy.

Romney has been especially raucous in his insistence that if he were president, he would have allowed the auto makers to go “belly-up” bankrupt, saying they could somehow have clawed their way back to profitability without a dollar of federal assistance.  He wrote in The Detroit News.  “The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse; I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

Of course, he was targeting the current Democratic president, and conveniently forgot to mention the significant part Obama’s Republican predecessor had in the bailout.  He also forgot to mention that it might take fifty years of double-digit unemployment to return to a position of significant market share in the global economy.

The Detroit News, which otherwise enthusiastically endorsed Mr. Romney in the Michigan primary, said he was dead wrong about the bailout.  The newspaper’s editorial board wrote, “Only the government was in a position to save the auto industry from “the darkest hour of its history”

Romney’s critique is entirely detached from reality.  Steven Rattner, who was Mr. Obama’s lead auto adviser, wrote in The NY Times that not one single dollar of private capital could be found to prop up the companies, despite desperate efforts, and he challenged Mr. Romney to name one investor who might differ.

Romney slid into this quicksand in 2008 with an Op-Ed essay in The Times arguing against government help for Detroit. It included the memorable prediction that if the bailout were granted, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”

Since Romney has been criticized for his inconsistency on so many other issues, he apparently feels he cannot back away from this one. It doesn’t matter that his argument has proved so wrong.  He can draw whatever conclusions he wants about a fictional reality.

Since his prediction has proved so incorrect, Romney has switched to a new tack on the issue — union-bashing.  Now he is calling the bailout “crony capitalism” because it saved union jobs.

He throws new unsubstantiated charges that President Obama used the Treasury for his own purposes to help his political allies. Romney wrote, “While a lot of workers and investors got the short end of the stick, Obama’s union allies — and his major campaign contributors — reaped reward upon reward, all on the taxpayer’s dime.”

High labor costs were undeniably a large part of the Detroit auto maker’s problems.  But Romney’s claim that the government did not do nearly enough to drive those costs down in the bailout is just flat-out wrong.  Indeed, labor made substantial concessions.

After earlier agreeing to let newly hired workers make half the wage of current employees, unions consented in the bailout deal to give up cost-of-living increases, dental coverage, and some work rules and vacation benefits.  Unions also took a leap of faith in accepting a company stock fund to pay for their health benefits, instead of cash.

Romney again conveniently ignores those givebacks, expressing anger that a health care fund for nearly half a million United Automobile Workers retirees (“union-boss controlled”) got a higher priority in the bailout than lenders to Chrysler.

In a recent speech, Romney continued to insist that the UAW and federal fuel-economy standards were somehow imperiling the future of the industry, even though neither seems to have slowed the auto makers’ current success.

Neither Romney nor any of the other Republican candidates are capable of admitting that sometimes it follows the path of the greater good to prevent a major employer from going out of business, even when that employer got into the situation themselves.  And only the government is large enough to rescue a major sector of the economy.

But any of the 1.45 million autoworkers, however, with paychecks they are taking home to their families, can explain it to them.