Maddow: Romney campaign and Rove play fast and loose with the truth

Rachel Maddow ran a report on Wednesday's edition of The Rachel Maddow Show about the unprecedented level of dishonesty coming out of the Romney campaign. On Thursday's program she took on more examples of ways in which Romney, former Bush administration official Karl Rove, and the Republican party are relying on lies, selective editing and blatant distortions of the facts to sell themselves to voters.

Maddow believes that the Romney campaign's willingness to play fast and loose with the truth and then issue no retractions or apologies when they get caught is unprecedented in modern history. Showing a clip of his first campaign ad, which mangled a quote by President Obama into meaning the opposite of what the president said, she asked if this was going to be the way things go for the rest of the 2012 election.

Apparently it is. Yesterday, in an Op Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove misleadingly edited a quote by Bill Clinton regarding the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. One of the most startling things about these lies is how easily debunked they are. And yet, no one at the Journal saw fit to fact check the piece before it went to press.

The question is whether not this is the template that the Republican Party is willing to operate from. Maddow says that even inside the hazy world of political and campaign rhetoric, these tactics are mind-boggling in their cynicism and mendacity.

Watch the clip, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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