Suppose that President Obama were to make the following statement:

Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and that only corporations and the wealthy have a right to be paid for the efforts. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever pay corporations choose to give them.

If Obama actually said anything like that, there would be a huge outcry. Romney has in fact said that corporations are people, and clearly favors policies that would be good for the wealthy and not so good for the middle class. But that’s a long way from proposing that the middle class be reduced to serfdom, and Obama would rightly be castigated for saying any such thing.

Yet here’s what Romney said yesterday:

Just a couple of weeks ago in Kansas, President Obama lectured us about Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy of government. But he failed to mention the important difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Roosevelt believed that government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities. President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing—the government. The truth is that everyone may get the same rewards, but virtually everyone will be worse off.

This is, as Jonathan Chait says, Glenn-Beck crazy. Obama favors a rise in top tax rates, back to their levels of the 1990s; he has enacted a health reform that is somewhat redistributive, since the uninsured tend to be relatively low-income. But nothing Obama has ever said and none of his actions bear any resemblance to Romney’s portrait.

And Romney is supposed to be the sensible, moderate Republican candidate.

What this shows, first of all, is the extent to which the whole GOP has gone deep into the crazy. But what it also shows is Romney’s complete contempt for the news media, which he counts on to let him get away with this stuff.

And he’s probably right in that contempt, given that we’re in a world where remarks like his are treated as business as usual, while completely true Democratic claims about the Ryan plan are designated as the Lie of the Year.