Fox News CEO and former Nixon aide Roger Ailes claimed late last year that his news channel had undergone a “course correction.” He no longer allowed Fox personalities to directly promote Tea Party events on the air, he cut back on the Palin, and he replaced Glenn Beck with five of the dullest personalities he could find.

Possibly reacting to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting – or the phone hacking scandal confronting parent News Corp – Ailes seemed to be trying to prevent his network from becoming a complete joke.

But as elections near, Fox News is like a werewolf beneath a full moon. Daily the channel has been morphing into a Romney telethon. Recently its producers manufactured a controversy to help Mitt Romney’s National Finance Co-Chair raise more millions. And then last week, all pretenses were dropped.

Fox and Friends — the morning show broadcast from an alternate dimension where Michele Bachmann makes sense and George W. Bush has Bill Clinton’s record — aired a four-minute attack ad targeting the President. Apparently a producer on the show worked on the ad “for weeks,” matching all the dishonesty of the Rove/Koch brothers’ ads attacking the President. But this particular dishonest attack ad aired in full for free on a national news network — twice.