I know that being this is a Presidential election, we shouldn’t be shocked at anything we see.

However, this new ad by Romney goes way beyond the pale. When I first saw it, I thought  “this has to be a parody.  No one can lie this brazenly.”

But it is a real ad. And it’s so false that, as you can see by the title of the video, it’s posted on youtube by people opposed to Romney.

According to the Huffington Post, the ad’s purpose is to turn the auto bailout in its favor by distorting both history and current events:

For starters, the ad’s narrator says that President Barack Obama “took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy.” That’s true. But that was also the plan that Romney prescribed at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. The difference is that Obama supported a bridge loan from the government to help the auto companies go through bankruptcy, while Romney wanted the private sector to pick up the tab. But as basically every principal involved in rescuing the auto industry said at the time, there was no money available from the private sector during the height of the recession. When Dan Akerson, CEO and chairman of General Motors since September 2010, was asked what would have happened had Romney’s plan been followed, he responded that GM “would have been in bankruptcy for years and I think you could have written off this company, this industry and this country.”

. . . the ad accuses Obama of selling “Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.” Again, this is technically true, but only according to a narrow reading of the language. Fiat, the Italian company that now owns Chrysler, is building Jeeps in China. But the company is not moving jobs from America to do it. Instead, Fiat is expanding current production in China for the purposes of catering to a growing Chinese market.

And the ad just goes looney after that:

Where the ad goes from misleading to something more nefarious is in the text it shows. At one point, it displays a line from a Bloomberg story stating that Chrysler “plans to return Jeep output to China,” the implication being that the company is moving operations there as opposed to expanding operations that are already there. Romney has cited this report on several occasions while campaigning and has been summarily criticized for doing so. Chrysler has denied the report, and multiple news outlets have called out the Romney campaign for using it in on the stump.

Apparently, the rationale behind the ad, according to the Huffington Post, is that it never said specifically that Chrysler is moving production to China, only that it’s going to be building Jeeps in China.

If you ask me, the rationale behind this ad seems to be that the Romney camp is trying to sneak a hot one past a nation concerned with Hurricane Sandy.

I don’t think anyone will buy this ad as truth but apparently the desperation of the Romney camp to win Ohio, a state affected positively by Obama’s decision to push the auto bailout,  is becoming so apparent that it’s beginning to leave a stench.