Romney Ends His Television Ad Campaign As He Began It – With a Brazen and Cynical Lie

What we have learned about Mitt Romney as a person during this election cycle is that he embodies the cliche of a politician who will do or say anything, no matter how vile, false or degrading, in order to win.

Nothing is more emblematic of Romney’s Nixonian corruption than the fact that he has chosen to open and close his general election advertising campaign with a pair of ads based on spurious lies.

The intentionally deceptive ad that launched Romney’s television campaign showed then Sen. Barack Obama in a video clip from four years ago quoting a statement from the campaign of his 2008 Republican opponent John McCain: “If we talk about the economy, we’ll lose.” In the 2012 Romney ad, the quote was deliberately taken out of context to make it appear the president was speaking during the current cycle and referring to his own campaign.

It’s hard to imagine a more cynical abuse of the public trust in presidential campaign advertising — except for the ad the Romney campaign is running now.

In the new ad, Romney claims that because Pres. Obama put the auto industry into bankruptcy — a postion Romney supported at the time in a op-ed titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” — now Chrysler, one of the auto companies saved by the bailout, is shipping American jobs building Jeeps to China.

The entire foundation of the ad is a lie. Here’s how Chrysler executive Gualberto Ranieri responded:

It is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats. Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China. It’s simply reviewing the opportunities to return Jeep output to China for the world’s largest auto market. U.S. Jeep assembly lines will continue to stay in operation. A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.

Chrysler’s CEO Sergio Marchionne also released a statement refuting Romney’s false claim. “I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position,” Marchionne wrote.”Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China.”

Romney’s ad has also earned derision in the Ohio press. The Cleveland Plain Dealer said the ad shows that Romney is “flailing,” “desperate” and attempting to sow confusion. However, the Plain Dealer predicted that Romney’s ploy “won’t work. Ohio voters know who stepped up when the auto industry was at the abyss — and it wasn’t Romney.”

The headline for the Fact Checker column at the Washington Post read, “4 Pinocchios for Mitt Romney’s misleading ad on Chrysler and China.” Factcheck.org’s headline said, “Romney Distorts Facts on Jeep, Auto Bailout.”

George W. Bush, the last Republican president, was also an infamous liar — in fact, lying was the only skill he had, as is evidenced by the fact that his record as president includes a string of massive failures but not one historically noteworthy accomplishment (other than being the most unpopular president in the history of presidential polling).

During the George W. Bush administration, Karl Rove, the White House political director and the architect of Bush’s multiple false narratives, told the writer Ron Susskind, that, in the Bush White House, “we create our own reality” — a feat they could accomplish, of course, because they could rely on Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets to perpetuate Bush/Rove’s lies and spin until they appeared to be truth.

What makes it all the more craven in both cases is that both Bush and Romney present themselves as deeply religious men of faith. Apparently they also believe that the admonition in the Decalogue that “thou shall not bear false witness” only applies to the little people — to you people.

Romney has taken Rove’s theory about reality creation and injected it with steroids. If he is elected on Tuesday, we’ll undoubtedly see a return to the fun-house mirror political environment we experienced during the Bush administration in which a highly scripted and stage-managed public show masks concerted efforts behind the scenes to finish the job started under Bush and his allies in Congress to transfer the resources of the United States from the taxpayers into the hands of a small group of corporate plutocrats.

Fox News is, of course, refusing to report on the backlash against Romney’s lies about Jeep in Ohio. And polls shows that the Romney campaign has successfully created a foundation of Rovian false reality that is substantial enough to support a win.