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Nonetheless, be not too quick to see the president of the United States as a mere hapless victim of vicious partisan politics. He is also a perpetrator. For the past 10 days, the president's Super Pac – Priorities USA Action – has been running a Swiftboat attack on Republican Mitt Romney so grotesque, so dishonest, so debased, as to force you to wonder who this Obama guy is, and whether he has been that guy all along. The ad features a former steel worker named Joe Soptic, recounting the death of his wife from cancer, after Soptic lost his health...

Debbie Downer, aka Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, was interviewed by John Roberts on Fox News Sunday. Roberts asked her about the Priorites USA ad that implies that Mitt Romney caused a woman to die from cancer. In the ad Joe Soptic says “When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care, and my family lost their health care,” Soptic says in the minute-long spot. “And a short time after that, my wife became ill . . . she passed away in 22 days.” There you go. Mitt Romney killed her. Never mind that Romney left Bain in 1999. Never mind...

Serious question: is there anything—anything!—Debbie Wasserman-Schultz won't say to promote Barack Obama? On Fox News Sunday, interviewed by guest host John Roberts, the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee somehow managed to keep a straight face as she brazenly claimed: "I have no idea of the political affiliation of folks who are associated" with Priorities USA, the Super PAC that ran the ad essentially blaming Mitt Romney for a woman's cancer death. But as is undoubtedly well known to Wasserman-Schultz, Priorities USA is run by Bill Burton—the former White House Deputy Press Secretary. View the video here.

The SuperPAC supporting Barack Obama, PrioritiesUSA Action, has produced an ad showing a man who claims is wife died of cancer because the steel plant at which he worked was closed by Mitt Romney. When he lost his job, Joe Soptic says, he lost his health insurance. "A short time later," he says, his wife got sick, but didn't tell him because they didn't have insurance. By the time he took her to the hospital she was diagnosed with cancer from which she died about two weeks later. The story is true in its facts, but it is a total...

The evidence connecting the Obama campaign to Priorities USA, a super PAC that launched an appalling and blatantly false attack ad blaming a woman's death on Mitt Romney, is starting to pile up. Bill Burton runs Priorities USA and was Obama's deputy press secretary under Robert Gibbs. You can also add in the fact that the man in the ad telling the undeniably tragic tale of his wife's passing, Joe Soptic, has also appeared in ads for the Obama campaign. Finally, just yesterday, senior Obama campaign advisor Stephanie Cutter was caught red-handed lying about her knowledge of the ad. The...

Is it just me or is Joe Soptic a dead ringer for Bob Newhart? A real live, separated-at-birth twin of the famous stoic comedian? I leave it to the pundits to determine the veracity of Joe Soptic’s claim that Mitt Romney killed his (first) wife by heartlessly offering him a buy out from his job as a steelworker – that he refused – before closing the steel mill that Bain bought in 1993 and operated for 8 years before it succumbed to the harsh economic realities of high labor costs (not helped by the 10 week union strike in 1997)...

Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu called the Obama campaign deceitful and “stupid” Thursday when responding to an attack ad by the Obama-aligned super-PAC, Priorities USA. Sununu said the Priorities USA ad distorted the truth and accused the Obama campaign of lying about coordination with the super-PAC. ... The Fox News host showed a clip of Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, telling CNN on Wednesday she hadn’t heard about Soptic’s story. The host then played a clip of a conference call with Cutter in May that featured Soptic. “This not only reveals the character of deceit in this campaign, it...

President Obama's embattled deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, was scheduled to appear on ABC's "This Week" yet seems to now have changed her mind as call for her firing intensifies. Cutter took to the press this week to claim that she and the campaign were unfamiliar with Joe Soptic and his story. This turned out to be false: not only was the Obama campaign familiar with Soptic, they hosted him on an OFA conference call and previously used him for a campaign ad.

Supporters of President Obama refused Thursday to pull a TV ad suggesting that Republican Mitt Romney caused a woman to die from cancer, a commercial that’s raising new questions about possible coordination between the Obama campaign and an “independent” advocacy group founded by a former White House staffer. “You know, in the past when somebody pointed out that something was inaccurate, campaigns either pulled the ad — they were embarrassed,” Mr. Romney said Thursday on Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America” radio show. “Today, they just blast ahead.” But officials at Priorities USA, a super PAC founded by former White House...

HITLER KNOWS THAT MITT PERSONALLY KILLED SOPTIC'S WIFE

A SuperPAC supporting Obama is under fire for airing an ad in which a steelworker accused Romney of making decisions that led to his wife's death. The Obama campaign has kept its distance from the ad — but it made the same charge, in a screenshot that appeared in an official Obama campaign slideshow.

Priorities USA Action(WASHINGTON) -- Lanny Davis, a former top adviser to President Bill Clinton, today issued a scathing rebuke to a controversial new Democratic super PAC ad that ties Mitt Romney to a woman’s death from cancer. “I’m pretty sad for our country that we have presidential candidates engaging in sophomoric — and that’s a compliment — sophomoric name calling,” Davis said in an interview on WMAL radio in Washington. Davis says both Romney and Obama, and their supporters, have sponsored ads “that make us all want to take a shower.” But when it comes to the cancer ad, he...

or the second straight day, CNN blew the whistle on a nasty and misleading Obama super PAC ad that ABC, CBS, and NBC entirely ignored as of Wednesday night. CNN hammered the ad, which links Mitt Romney to a woman's death from cancer, each hour from 6 p.m. through 10 p.m. and twice grilled the man responsible for the ad, Bill Burton of Priorities USA. "I think it is deliberately mendacious," stated CNN's Piers Morgan on Wednesday. "It is a deliberate attempt to lie and smear about Mitt Romney. And I find it contemptible. I mean I'm really appalled." The...

The Washington Post seemed to honor Obama-commercial star Joe Soptic in the news section Thursday. Nia-Malika Henderson’s article was headlined “For anti-Romney ads, Democrats call Joe the Steelworker.” The subhead: "New spot seems to tie his wife's death to plant's closure after Bain took over." Online, the headline was "Forget Joe the Plumber -- Meet Joe the Steelworker." The Post couldn't find space for the Soptic story on Wednesday, even though Henderson interviewed him on Tuesday. Just like with the David Plouffe-scores-100-grand story this week, the Post headlines downplayed that Henderson found more details that make the Soptic ad look...

The makers of a new Romney attack ad, as well as the steelworker featured in the television spot, are standing by the highly-scrutinized ad, saying the ad does not suggest that Romney is responsible for a woman's death from cancer. Joe Soptic, the former steelworker featured in a Priorities USA Action ad, told the Wall Street Journal that he thinks the ad is fair. In ad, the former GST Steel employee recounts how he lost his job and his health benefits after Bain Capital -- the private equity firm founded by Romney -- purchased and shut down the Kansas City...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Stephanie Cutter, too. These people are lying through their teeth when they say that they didn't know the details of Soptic's story. Yesterday morning on CNN Starting Point show, they had Stephanie Cutter, Obama's campaign manager... By the way, there's another aspect to this. And I don't think it would amount to anything but it's real. That is the question of coordination. By law, the campaign can have nothing to do with the super PAC. But the campaign has run ads with this guy. There have been two ads featuring Soptic. One Soptic ad was run by...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You know what I'm sitting here doing? I'm trying to think of a campaign ad from the past, in my lifetime, to compare with the "Romney Killed My Wife" ad. We know that the Obama people know that it's a lie. We know that they knew that everything in it was false. They don't care. That is the big point: They don't care. The point of that ad... Maybe we should spend some time explaining what the purpose of this is, because a lot of people make a mistake, here. For example, my friends, I know how...

Former steel worker Joe Soptic, who was prominently featured in President Obama's new anti-Romney ad, is actually a familiar face on the anti-Bain beat. In January, Soptic complained to Democracy Now, a liberal non-profit TV station, that when the steel company he worked fo "In my case in my department, they actually offered to buy our jobs out from underneath us," Soptic said.r was bought out, they tried to buy him out. Why is Soptic upset? Primarily, its because his pension was cut. In this interview, Soptic clarified that his 401k was not affected but he lost $400 a month...

The young men in business suits, gingerly picking their way among the millwrights, machinists and pipefitters at Kansas City's Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill. Gaping up at the cranes that swung 10-foot cast iron buckets through the air. Jumping at the thunder from the melt shop's electric-arc furnace as it turned scrap metal into lava. "They looked like a bunch of high school kids to me. A bunch of Wall Street preppies," says Jim Linson, an electronics repairman who worked at the plant for 40 years. "They came in, they were in awe." Apparently they liked what they saw. Soon...

...played a role in the death of Ilyona Soptic at age 55. The ad features Joe Soptic, 62, of Missouri, who lost his job when GST Steel of Kansas City—owned by Bain and other investors for eight years—was closed. As melancholy music plays, Mr. Soptic says that when the plant closed, he and his family lost their health-care coverage and "a short time after that, my wife became ill." Her illness was diagnosed five years later. "I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the plant," Mr. Soptic says in the ad. The steel...