Is Machiavelli Mitt’s alter ego in Ohio?

They lie.  And then they lie about their lies by defending them as truths.

So it is with the latest barrage of Romney TV ads in Ohio  accusing the President of bankrupting the auto industry and sending Jeeps to China.   If you measure a political ad by the number of lies in a single breath, Mitt’s forces have desperately reached for zero sky-is-falling  credibility this week in his attempt to swing Ohio to his column.

Is that what we might expect by the Supreme CEO who has doubtless read  Machiavelli while his tent-mate, Paul Ryan,  was absorbing Ayn Rand, who had little use for the underachievers?

We can only imagine how the ad-makers went about charging Obama with dismantling the auto industry while personally selling Chrysler to those Italians, who, in turn, would build Jeeps in China.

Our assumed version:

As they pondered the thrust of the ad, one of the spinmeisters  seemed less than confident that it would sell, even to soft-headed Buckeyes who sit around all day waiting for the next OSU football game.

“I mean,” he tried to convince the others, “the liberal media, the Columbus Dispatch notwithstanding, have already shot holes in the Jeep thing. Maybe we should blame Barack Hussein for the collapsed crane in Manhattan for the shoddy work by his union friends and let it go at that.”

“Don’t think it would work in Ohio,” said another in the skull session. “Ohioans destroyed  Issued 2 last year ( the one about Senate Bill 5 that restricted public workers unions). Need I remind you that Mitt endorsed that bill  when he  visited their governor Kookish, or whatever the hell his name is.  No sense bringing that up again. So we have  to settle on the Jeep thing.”

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s how an Italian Jeep executive was quoted by David Kiley, the  editor-in-chief of AOL Autos reported it:

“Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting  production of its Jeep models out of North America to China,” says Gualberto Ranieri,  Jeep’s senior vice president of corporate communications.”

Kiley writes:

“It’s true that President Obama’s administration took General Motors and Chrysler into a brief government assisted bankruptcy, which was necessary  to restructure the companies’ debts and keep them from closing their doors.    This process, led and financed by the Obama Administration,  allowed the companies to re-emerge from bankruptcy in tact.  The move was hailed by auto industry analysts and managements of the companies, (including self-described  Republican GM CEO Daniel Akerson) as critical to the companies’ survival and job stability in the Midwest.”

Allow me to quote an expert on seizing and sustaining power, Niccolo Machiavelli:

“Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.”

Or:

“Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs  that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.”

Sorry to drag old Niccolo into the presidential race, but, as I’ve noted above,  there’s a lot of Niccolo going on in Mittville.