June 03, 2016 12:16 PM UTC

"Liar Keyser," Pants on Fire

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• by: Colorado Pols

The latest fact-check from Politifact Colorado is quite harsh on GOP U.S. Senate dead man walking candidate Jon Keyser’s new “TV ad,” which has a token presence on television screens after a trifling media buy, and has already been flagged with questionable content by the Denver Post’s John Frank:

“Now Obama wants to give these guys nuclear weapons and Michael Bennet, he was all for it.”

Keyser is among five Republicans vying to win the June 28 primary and the right to take on Bennet in the general election.

He’s not the only Republican attacking a Democratic opponent this election season on the Iran deal, which the Obama administration and five other nations approved in 2015…

Democrats did support the deal, but the intention was clearly not to allow Iran to produce a nuclear weapon. When we rechecked the terms for this fact-check, we found that was still the case.

Keyser’s ad goes a step further to say Obama and Bennet want Iran to produce such a weapon. That incendiary characterization is also not true.

There’s plenty of disagreement over whether or not the nuclear weapons agreement reached between the Islamic Republican of Iran and a group of the world’s most powerful nations will be effective over the long term in preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. But no one except perhaps a small number of talk-radio crackpots (here’s looking at you, Peter Boyles) would seriously make the allegation that President Barack Obama, the allied nations involved in the negotiations, and U.S. Senators who supported the agreement like Sen. Michael Bennet want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

We contacted the Keyser campaign. A spokesman did not provide evidence to back up the claim.

Obviously they couldn’t provide any evidence, because it’s ridiculous.

We assume Keyser is smart enough to know that what he said in this ad is over-the-top false. To throw out this kind of rhetoric in an ad you barely have the money to get aired is clearly a ploy to obtain press coverage, under the theory that even press excoriating you for lying is better than no press–or in Keyser’s case, the past month of totally disastrous press about his campaign’s alleged petition fraud.

The problem is that the press didn’t let him have even the one news cycle needed to make the ploy work. They started with the token buy, and moved right into the false claims without giving Keyser anything he could use.

All of which makes Keyser’s incendiary “Hail Mary” look like the last desperate act of a candidate who has already lost.