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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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From this Wednesday evening's CBS News, Mitt Romney, who is running a presidential campaign based on lie after lie, after lie, taking his opponent out of context, flip flopping to the point where he can't even make it though one news cycle without changing his story about the last thing that came out of his own mouth, accused the Obama campaign of "character assassination."

And naturally Jan Crawford just allowed this to pass without pressing him for a single specific on what has been said about him that he believes is not true. She didn't bother to ask him about his campaign setting a new record for the number of lies told either. As we've noted here before, Steve Benen's been keeping a running list, and the number is simply staggering. Here's his latest from last Friday -- Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXXV.

Here's more from CBS -- Romney: Obama engaged in "character assassination":

Mitt Romney told CBS News Wednesday that despite calls from conservatives to be more aggressive, he is not going to engage in a campaign of "character assassination" - despite the Obama campaign's willingness to do so.

"This is a campaign, not about character assassination, even though that's what I think has come from the Obama camp by and large," Romney told CBS News' Jan Crawford before a rally in Toledo, Ohio. Crawford asked Romney if he was saying the Obama campaign was engaged in character assassination.

"Oh yeah, sure, they try and completely misrepresent my point of view, along with why I'm in this race," he said. "But I think fundamentally the American people are interested in who can make their life better. Who can make people get better jobs and better incomes. And I can. He's proven that he does not have the capability to do that."

Later, Crawford asked Romney if the mainstream media is "in the tank for President Obama," as many conservatives allege.

"Well, I think we have a system of free press, people are able to provide their own perspective based on their own beliefs, I think there's some people who are more in my camp, there's a lot of people who are more in his camp, and I don't worry about that," Romney responded.

Pressed, Romney added: "I don't think anybody in my business thinks they wouldn't like to re-write the stories, and write the media accounts in a way that's more favorable to them, but I don't worry about that. I take my message out, I know I'll have a chance through ads, through the debates, to get my message home to the American people."

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From the season premier of Saturday Night Live, a parody of one of the Obama for America's attack ads hitting Mitt Romney for his time at Bain Capital. I await Fox "News" going after them with "fact-checks" on their comedy skit and asking if they were "fair and balanced" with their treatment of Mittens.

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Rachel Maddow featured the work by ProPublica which you can find crossposted at our own Occupy America here -- Revealed: The Dark Money Group Attacking Sen. Sherrod Brown.

I encourage everyone to just go read their entire report, but I'll share a bit more of the post which Rachel featured in her segment this Monday evening:

The documents identifying Norris as the chairman of the Fund are public because of a Federal Communications Commission rule requiring TV stations to keep detailed records about political advertisers. The files can be valuable, offering a look at exactly who is spending and how much. Until recently, the documents were only available by physically traveling to stations. ProPublica's Free the Files project has spotlighted the issue and this summer the FCC passed a rule requiring the stations in the nation's top markets to upload the files to agovernment website.

The system is far from perfect and has a lot of limitations, but it's a start.

And as Rachel noted, the FCC does now have a searchable site for local stations to see who is running ads in your area. You can visit the site here: https://stations.fcc.gov/.

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Okay, let me get this straight. Apparently, according to Politico's John Harris, running ads against Mitt Romney for things that are true, like the fact that he is out of touch with most Americans and their struggles and that his time at Bain Capital just reinforces that, is somehow "personal," but Romney running lying ads about President Obama supposedly gutting welfare work requirements, calling him a "food stamp president" and diving into birtherism is somehow either not "personal" or it's not even worth mentioning during this segment on The Chris Matthews Show.

Here's Harris responding to Matthews asking him about their recent article: Verdict is in: Obama levels more personal attacks.

MATTHEWS: You know I thought John that Bill Clinton gave a heck of a punching kind of speech. He had every one of the Republican points, punched back at them. And the question is, how negative are they going to get? You say they're running... in your recent piece at Politico, you say that the Obama campaign is running a personal assault on whether this guy Romney is even qualified to be president.

HARRIS: The essence of what Obama's doing is to say Mitt Romney is just at a personal level not credible as a potential president of the United States because of his personal values – too greedy – his personal experience is too disconnected from the concerns of average Americans.

I'm not trying to give a Good Housekeeping seal of approval to the Romney campaign. They too are running an intensely negative campaign. It's not based so much on Obama's personal characteristics, his values, or that he is somehow, in some sort of fundamentally way... fundamental way, corrupt. Where as, the Obama people are calling Romney a charlatan, suggesting that he might be a felon because of how he's handled the Bain issue as Stephanie Cutter did. That's aimed at tearing him down personally.

But I don't have any sympathy for Romney. That's what he did in the Republican... he did that to Santorum and he did it to Gingrich.

The Politico article does admit that there are a bunch of personal attacks that have been waged against President Obama from others on the right, but they ignore or lie about the fact that many of them have come directly from the Romney campaign and they also give Romney a pass for not doing more to refute those on the right who have been happy to push those lies or to stand up to the extremists in his own party.

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Here we go again with the talking heads on Fox, defending Mitt Romney's dishonest "you didn't build that" ad. Context doesn't matter. Lies don't matter. Policy doesn't matter. Reality doesn't matter. You can say anything and all that matters is how the voters "feel" and there is never any penalty with the media for lying every time your lips are moving. Juan Williams tried pushing back at the nonsense from Wallace and the other panel members, but he may as well have been talking to himself.

And on the topic of lying, here's the latest from Steve Benen, who's been tracking the sheer volume of Romney's lies week after week: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXVII:

Paul Krugman, who's been nearly as frustrated by Mitt Romney's habitual dishonesty as I've been, noted this week that political observers should pause to appreciate "this remarkable spectacle." Krugman added, "I really don't think there's been anything like this in American political history: a presidential campaign, with a pretty good chance of winning, that is based entirely on cynical lies about what the sitting president has said."

I agree. Mitt Romney is, at a minimum, unique.

What's especially striking, in addition to the volume and frequency of the falsehoods, is how often the dishonesty is obvious. Jonathan Bernstein has labeled this "lazy mendacity" -- untruths based on "the indifference to any fact-checking," and "the insistence on continuing to use a lie long after it's been definitively debunked."

Add to that the cable yappers saying the lies don't matter, which the clip above is just one example of and it's sadly by no means limited to Fox. All of the networks have run similar segments. Go read the rest of Steve's post for the latest list of Romney's lies. There are twenty six new ones just for this week.

Transcript of the Fox News Sunday segment below the fold.

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Former C&L contributor and now Rachel Maddow Show producer and Maddow Blog contributor Steve Benen joined guest host Ezra Klein on Maddow's show and discussed the subject of one of his recent posts, which is the fact that Republicans can't run against President Obama's actual policies, so they have to resort to constantly taking him out of context.

All out of context, all the time:

The Republican National Committee is excitedly sending around this clip today, showing 17 seconds of a speech President Obama delivered to supporters in Oakland on Tuesday. Some of the RNC's media allies are already on board with the attack. [...]

The idea, apparently, is for voters to recoil at the notion that the president believes his economic plan has "worked." I appear to be in the minority, but I happen to think this is true -- the economy that was hemorrhaging jobs is now adding jobs; the economy that was shrinking is now growing; the stock market that was headed into a death spiral is now headed up; an auto industry that was on the verge of collapse is now thriving, etc.

That said, it's obviously a contentious point, and the economy is not yet close to where it needs to be. But as Dave Weigel noted, the significance of the RNC's gambit isn't a debate over the efficacy of Obama's policies, but rather, the Republicans' bad habit of wrenching quotes from context.

As Steve noted, he was talking about the Clinton era as compared to the Bush era and the RNC decided to just leave that part of the clip out. More with his running list of this nonsense below the fold.

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After a week or so of watching the right wing and pundits on television either make excuses for the Romney campaign taking President Obama's "you didn't build that" comment out of context, or as Jon Stewart showed in this segment, going out of their way to repeat the distortion, it was nice to see them get taken to the woodshed again on The Daily Show.

Last night it was Lewis Black ripping up the Romney campaign, and tonight it was Stewart's turn.

After showing a compilation of some of the various talking heads out there, with Erick Erickson calling President Obama's remarks "grade school Marxism," Stewart responded:

STEWART: Yes! Grade school Marxism... or, as your second grade teacher might have referred to it... sharing.

Stewart went on to show the hacks over at Fox & Friends doing their best to make things worse as Media Matters clipped here: Fox Claims To Offer "Context" For Obama Comments -- Then Airs Another Deceptively Edited Clip and we brought you here: Kilmeade Asks Little Girls if Government Built Their Lemonade Stand .

He followed that up with these remarks:

STEWART: Look, the campaigns all like to have fun with gaffes, making it a big deal out of a misstatement is a great way to win a news cycle. [...] but this ain't a gaffe. And Mitt Romney's not having a little fun with it. This deliberate misstating and misrepresentation of his position is now the centerpiece or Romney's entire campaign. He's got signage, T-shirts, and this unrelenting ad. [...]

Mr. Romney, hanging your attack on a person's slight grammatical misstep is what people do in an argument when they're completely f**ked and they know they have no argument.

I know you, Mitt Romney would like this election to be a stark choice to the American people and to Obama's vision of a Marxist state-run oligarchy and your simple and your simple ode to the freedom our Founders envisioned, because given that choice, you would... come really close. But, you're not running against this guy, Straw-Man Johnson.

Stewart wrapped things up with a mashup of Romney repeating all of the same lines as President Obama on the need for infrastructure and the fact that no one makes it on their own.

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The Obama campaign wasn't spared either, but most of Lewis Black's epic rant on The Daily Show this Tuesday evening was directed towards the lying Romney campaign and their ridiculous "you didn't build that" ad and his hypocrisy on the subject.

Campaigns have finally arrived in the 21st century. They can produce bulls**t at the same rate as actual bulls.

...

So to be clear... running a business is something you do all by yourself. Running a four minute mile... that takes a village.

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Here we go again. Earlier in the week we had Joe Klein repeating this nonsense. Now it was Chuck Todd filling in for Chris Matthews on his weekend show, making the claim that the Obama campaign is somehow “Swiftboating” Mitt Romney.

TODD: Dan, we know that this is, it feels right out of the 2004 Karl Rove playbook. In fact I think Charlie Cook wrote earlier this week that Karl Rove ought to get royalties from the Obama campaign on what they're doing. Essentially, they're Swiftboating Romney.

And Dan Rather agreed with him. I don't expect any better out of Gloria Borger or Kathleen Parker who will gladly repeat Republican talking points ad nauseum, but after what the Bush campaign did to him while the Swiftboat attacks were going on against John Kerry, you'd think we'd get a little more honesty out of Rather, and some push back as to why what the Obama campaign is doing with the Bain attacks is not the same as the attacks on Kerry's military record. Instead he was happy to play along and help Todd compare the attack ads to Karl Rove as well.

Kathleen Parker goes on to carry some water for the dishonest so-called “fact checker” Glenn Kessler over at the Washington Post who lied and claimed there was nothing to the attacks on Bain Capital, even discounting the other reporting from journalists at his same paper. For some background on why no one should be calling him a “fact checker” on anything, I'd recommend reading Marcy Wheeler's post about him from earlier this week before anyone else holds him up as some “journalist” who can be counted on to tell the truth: Yesterday’s Some-Sayers Have Become Today’s Fact-Checkers. Just go read the whole thing but she's got a very long list going back to the George W. Bush years on how Kessler's been doing this same sort of thing for a very long time now. All things are not equal when you have one side continually just making stuff up out of whole cloth and the other side attacking you for things that are true.

And all of them on the panel this week were completely dismissive of what a nasty, dishonest, mean spirited presidential campaign Mitt Romney has run from day one, but oh my goodness, don't dare let the Obama campaign run any nasty ads attacking Mitt Romney, or voters might not think he's a nice guy any more and there's going to be blow back. Funny how that only seems to apply to one side with our Villagers in the beltway media.