Back in December of last year, I wrote that the Romney campaign was giving us fair warning they would lie as much as they thought necessary to win the general election. Our initial sense of what they were capable of came by way of a campaign ad in which they "quoted" Barack Obama saying, "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." Pretty much everyone with any degree of integrity pointed out that Obama used those words during the 2008 campaign to cite something his opponent, John McCain, had said.

The New York Times described the backstory this way:

On October 16, 2008, campaigning in Londonderry, New Hampshire, Obama cast his opponent, John McCain, as out of touch with the problems facing the country – a month after the financial collapse that saw the American economy crater. Obama was expressing his incredulity at McCain's lack of understanding of the full import of the world-engulfing fiscal crisis: "Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, 'If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.'"

This is what a Romney campaign aide said at the time:

First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business... Ads are agitprop... Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It's ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context... All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.