Four Pinocchios: Washington Post Savages Team Obama's Latest Anti-Romney ad

Because the previous attacks on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s business record have been, you know, so successful, team Obama has decided to combine all of their anti-Romney/business talking points into one 30-second ad:

The only problem with this commercial is that it’s pretty much false. Even the Washington Post (the Washington Post!) gave it a big, fat “F” for being misleading and dishonest.

The WaPo’s Glenn Kessler points out the inaccuracies:

In a previous life, The Fact Checker covered renowned corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and his ilk. We also have closely studied Bain Capital, and can find no examples that come close to this situation; its deals were done in close association with management. Indeed, Bain generally held onto its investments for four or five years, in contrast to the quick bust-em-ups of real corporate raiders. So calling Romney a “corporate raider” is a real stretch.

[…]

Regarding the outsourcing claims…The Obama campaign rests its case on three examples of Bain-controlled companies sending jobs overseas. But only one of the examples -- involving Holson Burns Group -- took place when Romney was actively managing Bain Capital.

Regarding the other claims, concerning Canadian electronics maker SMTC Manufacturing and customer service firm Modus Media, the Obama campaign tries to take advantage of a gray area in which Romney had stepped down from Bain -- to manage the Salt Lake City Olympics -- but had not sold his shares in the firm.

The Modus Media case is also not an example of shipping jobs overseas. The company closed one plant in California and transferred the jobs to North Carolina, Washington and Utah. At the same time, it opened an unrelated plant in Mexico.

These are just a few of the problems with the ad. Amazingly enough, there are more.

And here's something that, depending on your political persuasion, is either hilarious or depressing: when members of Team Obama heard that the WaPo might give their commercial a miserable rating, they actually contacted Kessler to try to convince him of their arguments.

How do you think that went?

“On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue, from the use of ‘corporate raider’ to its examples of alleged outsourcing. Simply repeating the same debunked claims won’t make them any more correct,” Kessler writes.

And to that, Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey had this to say:

No, but it keeps making Obama’s hostility and ignorance towards Wall Street and investors more and more plain. After watching this ad, any undecideds [sic] in the financial industry had to be thinking that Obama might be coming after Romney today, but tomorrow, it might be them.

Exit question: based on how Romney has run his campaign thus far, how long do you think it'll take for one of his PACs to punch back? We're putting bets on less than 24 hours.

(H/T: WZ)