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As our friends over at Media Matters took note of this Thursday, the Republican propaganda channel has decided to yet again make another political attack ad for the Republicans. The Five's Eric Bolling offered up the clip shown above for Republicans (or Joe Biden) should they wish to use it against a Hillary Clinton presidential bid for 2016.

As one of the commenters pointed out in their post, this ad offered up by Bolling looks almost identical to one that the RNC had planned to run during the last presidential campaign and decided not to due to a request by Mitt Romney: Exclusive: The RNC Benghazi Attack Ad that Never Ran:

It was the Benghazi attack ad the Republican National Committee created but never aired.

ABC News has obtained an ad the RNC made last fall and approved to air in the final weeks of the presidential campaign. The ad begins with a replay of Hillary Clinton’s famous “3 a.m. phone call” commercial from the 2008 campaign and then cuts to video of the burning U.S. consulate in Benghazi Libya. [...]

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Nice job by the DNC with their latest ad, hitting Mitt Romney for his remarks about the 47 percent that don't pay federal income taxes.

Talking to wealthy donors, Mitt Romney disdainfully dismissed half of America

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I'm still waiting for Romney to release his tax returns so we can find out if there were any years he was part of the 47 percent himself.

UPDATE: Here's the video transcript:

VOICEOVER: The Romney campaign is in crisis mode, scrambling to explain a secretly recorded tape where Romney tells wealthy donors nearly half of all Americans see themselves as victims.

BRIAN WILLIAMS (NBC): He talked about citizens who see themselves as victims; pay no income taxes. He went on to say his job was not to worry about those people.

JOHN KING (CNN): What he said in that speech was that all of them don't pay taxes. All of them are victims. All of them want free healthcare--think they're entitled to free housing. He essentially smeared everyone.

GRAPHIC OF DAVID BROOKS EDITORIAL:

It suggest that he really doesn't know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A. Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security and Medicare?

ANCHOR (CNN): If Mr. Romney is so upset that so many Americans are not paying income taxes, does that mean taxes on middle class or lower middle class Americans will go up?

KING (CNN): A lot of Americans of all income stripes have struggled the last few years and the risk for Governor Romney is that it is insulting to them. As a kid, my family was on food stamps for a few years when my dad got sick.

We didn't feel entitled and we weren't victims. And my father was actually pretty embarrassed about the whole thing. But in the end my mother was grateful because she was able to feed her kids.

DAVID GERGEN (with former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer looking on) (CNN): It was almost oafish for someone who has a bank account in Cayman Islands, in order to reduce taxes, to criticize someone in need.

ANNE KORNBLUT (WASHINGTON POST): It's going to reverberate with working class white people who don't pay taxes. It's going to reverberate with women. It's going to reverberate with military families. I don't think there's any group that's not going to in some way be--either hear about what he said or see themselves somehow reflected in it.

GERGEN (CNN): It's not just this comment. It's a pattern. It's a series over time. Americans tend to create a circle in their mind of people inside that circle who would make a credible, comfortable president; someone they could see in that office and they would feel comfortable with. I think this pattern of statements is increasingly placing Mitt Romney outside that circle for a growing number of Americans.

Ad ends with:

Mitt Romney:
Outside the circle.

(h/t FiredUpinCA for the transcript.)

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Jon Stewart laid waste to Mitt Romney and his deceptive campaign ad, taking President Obama out of context for his "you didn't build that" remarks. His cohort on Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert did not disappoint with his take on the subject and his failed attempt to prove that he didn't need to rely on any of his staff to do his show.

Colbert followed this segment up by "rehiring" his supposedly fired staff and asking that no one ever speak of it again. Gotta' love it. It's a sad day when our comedians have to be the ones pointing out how utterly ridiculous the Romney campaign attacks are with the whole it takes a village and no one made it on their own nonsense and the right's pathetic response to someone saying something that is actually true.

Unless you're living in some hut out in the woods apart from the rest of civilized society, you've relied on your fellow citizens for that civil society existing and have benefited from it. The fact that we don't have more calling out Romney for his hypocrisy as we saw from Colbert and Stewart this Wednesday is just further proof that our so-called fourth estate in America for the most part is dead. It's still on life support with some glimmers of hope out there, but we've got a long way to go with doing something about the amount of propaganda most Americans are exposed to on a daily basis if they turn on their television set.

I'm eternally grateful for someone like Colbert and his ability to make me laugh instead of cry about it.

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The Rev. Al Sharpton spoke to Elizabeth Warren about her opponent for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, Scott Brown and his latest dishonest attack ad where he decided to take a page out of Mitten's book and take her and President Obama out of context.

Here's more on that from Greg Sargent: Scott Brown gets in on the Big Lie:

Obama’s now infamous “didn’t build that” speech is similar to Elizabeth Warren’s viral remarks about how the rich didn’t get rich on their own. So it’s not surprising that Senator Scott Brown has just released a new Web video (embedded below) tying Obama’s remarks to Warren’s and painting them as vaguely anti-American. Brown says: “I will never demonize you as business leaders and business owners.” Brown, apparently taken with the plaudits Romney has earned from the right for lying relentlessly about Obama’s quote, has now done the same. [...]

Just as Romney’s Web video does, the audio is edited to remove the chunk of the speech in which Obama talks about our “great American system” and “roads and bridges,” misleading listeners into believing that the “didn’t build that” line was an insult to business owners. Any listener would reasonably conclude that the language quoted above is exactly as Obama delivered it. [...]

This gives me an occasion to make another point. The whole ”didn’t build that” dust-up is important, because the larger falsehood on display here — that Obama demeans success — is absolutely central to the Republican case against Obama. The Republican argument — Romney’s argument — is partly that Obama’s active ill will towards business owners and entrepreneurs is helping stall the recovery, so you should replace him with a president who wants people to succeed.

There is a separate policy dispute under way, too — Republicans insist that deregulation and tax reform that will cut taxes for the rich further are the way to speed the recovery, while Obama says more government intervention is necessary. But Republicans have decided the policy difference isn’t enough. They also need to sow doubts about Obama’s alleged intentions and hostility towards private enterprise and individual initiative, to give voters a narrative about the Obama presidency and an explanation for the sluggish recovery that will make them more receptive to GOP tax and deregulatory policies they might otherwise greet with skepticism. The claim that Obama demeans success is central to that narrative. Without lies like this one about the “didn’t build that” quote, that claim and that narrative collapse. And that’s why this matters.

Don't forget you can donate to Elizabeth Warren's campaign at our Act Blue page if you'd like to help her replace Wall Street's favorite Senator, Scott Brown.

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This has to be one of the most pathetic things I've watched in a long time and given the crazy train that the Republican Party has become in recent years, that's saying a lot. Here's more from Ed Kilgore over at Washington Monthly: A Classic of Inversion:

If for some reason you can’t access this video, it’s an ad from famous African-American right-wingers Ken Blackwell and Herman Cain attacking Eric Holder for failing to protect the right to vote by refusing to pursue the hallucinatory New Black Panther Party voter intimidation “threat” and by persecuting poor Rick Scott, who’s just trying to protect the “integrity” of the ballot box. This rolls out after images from the civil rights movement and a pious statement from the duo about the hard-fought right to vote.

This ad is the most striking example yet of the peculiar psychological need of conservatives to convince themselves that when they are messing with minority folks they are actually warriors in the fight for civil rights, while the self-same minority folks are self-hating bigots and/or helpless pawns in the grip of white elites. I mean, really: they could just admit they want to discourage African-Americans from voting because they tend to vote for the wrong party, or that they’d oppose “welfare” whether or not a case could be made that it is victimizing its beneficiaries. All this bizarre self-righteousness and parading of minority spokespeople in communications clearly aimed at a virtually all-white audience is getting downright pathological.

Here's more from Wonkette: Herman Cain, Ken Blackwell Team Up For Most Ludicrous Video Ever:

Herman Cain and Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state who STOLE THE 2004 ELECTION WITH MACHINES, have teamed up to produce this video about the Right to Vote. They do so by criticizing the Justice Department’s attempts to ensure black people can vote in the face of new laws that are clearly trying to suppress black turnout. And how could DoJ also refuse to pursue the New Black Panther Party scandal? Herman Cain and Ken Blackwell would have pursued it, for civil rights.

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This is the type of segment on Chris Matthews' show Hardball that makes me want to just throw something at the television set. It seems Karl Rove's PAC, Crossroads GPS has a new lie filled attack ad out and the best we got with any acknowledgment of that fact in the clip above, was Cynthia Tucker calling it "a good ad" and admitting there are "a couple of lies" in it, but hey, that's just politics.

Well, that's fine and good that yes, we know politicians and people like Karl Rove tell lies, but isn't the job of reporters to let the viewers know what those lies are and why they're not true? Instead we have Matthews showing the ad and Tucker and former RNC head Michael Steele discussing which voters it's supposed to influence, and a discussion on the fact that we don't know where the money is coming from to run the ad and who is donating to these Super PACs.

I'm all for getting the money out of politics and full disclosure on these ads as all of them said they were in the segment above, but I would have appreciated a conversation about the fact that the ad doesn't just have "a couple of lies." It's packed full of them, not to mention the irony of Karl Rove not being willing to stick his name on the ad, so the unfortunate television viewers who happen to watch it will know that Rove is the one responsible for these ads blaming Obama for not cleaning up the mess his old boss left us, regardless of who's donating to his PAC.

We got a lot more honest assessment of the ad from Steve Benen today over at The Maddow Blog: The best lies money can buy:

The New York Times seems quite impressed with the latest attack ad from Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, which is poised to blanket the airwaves in swing states. The Times calls it "deeply researched," "delicately worded," and "low key."

The paper neglected to mention another phrase: misleading to an offensive degree.

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Lawrence O'Donnell talked to Massachusetts Democratic candidate for the Senate and progressive champion Elizabeth Warren about the latest polls from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell/Boston Herald survey released released this week, showing her with a 49 to 42 percent lead over incumbent Senator Scott Brown.

As O'Donnell noted, any time an incumbent goes below 50 percent in the polls even when their opponent is not polling higher than they are, it spells some serious trouble for their reelection prospects.

So naturally with not only Brown polling below that 50 percent, but Warren also polling with a seven point lead, the GOP is freaking out and getting desperate. Which leads us to Karl Rove and his group and his desperate smear of Warren, trying to paint her as somehow being friendly to Wall Street.

Disingenuous Karl Rove Ad Smears Elizabeth Warren, Implies She Facilitated Bank Bailouts And Corporate Bonuses:

Karl Rove’s independent group Crossroads GPS is up with a new advertisement today, smearing Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D) by insinuating that she was responsible for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the bank bailout that took place at the height of the financial crisis.

The ad blames Warren for “bailing out the same banks that caused the financial meltdown, bailouts that helped pay big bonuses to bank executives while middle class Americans lost out.” It closes by imploring the viewer to “tell Professor Warren we need jobs, not more bailouts and bigger government.” [...]

The accusation that Warren is responsible for TARP, bank bailouts, or huge executive bonuses is beyond absurd. TARP and the bank bailouts were Republican ideas that began under President Bush. As Simon Johnson notes, Warren “has also been a strong supporter of all efforts to rein in Too Big To Fail banks, including by breaking them up.”

In fact, her work creating and heading up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau involved advocating directly on consumers’ behalf, a key check on the power of big banks. She also ran the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, where her role was to track the money that was given to the banks. She was extremely critical of both the banks’ and Washington’s inability to accurately account for TARP money. Read on...

As O'Donnell pointed out during his interview with Warren, he doesn't think the voters of Massachusetts are that stupid to fall for Rove's ads. If the polling continues in her favor the way it has, I'd say he's right.

You can donate to Warren's campaign though our Act Blue page here.