Yesterday, Mitt Romney made an incredibly stupid decision when he decided to frame his views on health care as “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” This is a highly potent string of words that can be easily used to characterize him as out of touch with everyday Americans, millions of them who have been fired or laid off since the beginning of the recession.

However, as Romney now attempts to plead to voters that his political rivals are taking it out of context (“I was talking about insurance companies. Yeah, we like to be able to get rid of insurance companies that don’t give us the insurance we need.”), he has to deal with fact that he has previously set the bar for what’s contextually acceptable.

If you recall, Romney’s campaign released a blatantly deceptive web ad about a month ago that quoted Obama as saying “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose,” when the real, uncut Obama quote was “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’”

When asked about this misleading, the Romney campaign actually boasted of its effectiveness and defended the use of “propaganda”:

“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.”

Consequently, it’s laughable to see that Romney is now the one to plead “context!”