"Joe Isuzu for President"

Jake Tapper (ABC News):

So now the Clinton campaign has taken it to the next level, taking it to the airwaves with their patently false twisting of Barack Obama's words.

“Listen to Barack Obama last week talking about Republicans," the announcer says.

“The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years," Obama says.

“Really?" says the announcer. "Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street. Running up a $9 trillion debt. Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis. Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?”

“The Republicans were the party of ideas," Obama says again.

"Hillary Clinton thinks this election is about replacing disastrous Republican ideas with new ones, like jumpstarting the economy," says the announcer. "Putting an immediate freeze on foreclosures and mortgages. Cutting taxes for the middle class. and creating millions of new jobs. With the economy in crisis, we need a president with the ideas, the solutions that get America working for all of us. Hillary Clinton. Solutions for America."

At this point, the Clintons obviously know and don't care that this is a blatantly false representation of what Obama said, which doesn't square with the video or transcript of what Obama said.

This has been tirelessly fact-checked by us, the Washington Post, Factcheck.org, Politico, and Politifact.

With unanimity, the charge has been established as false.

And yet the Clintons continue to make it.

We fact checked this twisting (as well as some Obama fudges) on Good Morning America this morning (Watch it HERE or read the dot-com version HERE.

The conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal today looked at Obama's frustration in the face of this (and other) Clinton falsehoods, writing that "One of our favorite Bill Clinton anecdotes involves a confrontation he had with Bob Dole in the Oval Office after the 1996 election. Mr. Dole protested Mr. Clinton's attack ads claiming the Republican wanted to harm Medicare, but the President merely smiled that Bubba grin and said, 'You gotta do what you gotta do.'...The Illinois Senator is still a young man, but not so young as to have missed the 1990s. He nonetheless seems to be awakening slowly to what everyone else already knows about the Clintons, which is that they will say and do whatever they 'gotta' say or do to win. Listen closely to Mr. Obama, and you can almost hear the echoes of Bob Dole at the end of the 1996 campaign asking, 'Where's the outrage?'"

Bob Dole, of course, lost that race.

Howie P.S.: One hopes (and prays) things have evolved since then. Just in case they haven't, the WaPo's political blog, "The Trail," has the Obama campaign's reaction to the ad.

Barack Obama