the best Democratic political ads produced in decades, have clearly knocked Team Willard off their game. They are apparently frustrated and angry, and they're looking to strike back.

"[Romney] has said Obama's a nice fellow, he's just in over his head," the adviser said. "But I think the governor himself believes this latest round of attacks that have impugned his integrity and accused him of being a felon go so far beyond that pale that he's really disappointed. He believes it's time to vet the president. He really hasn't been vetted; McCain didn't do it."

The idea that Obama "hasn't been vetted" comes directly from the late Andrew Breitbart's and his pet project, "The Vetting" which to date has produced nothing but a series of widely-mocked nothing burgers.

And that's because the idea that the president hasn't been vetted is deeply nutty.

First, Obama was vetted by the Clinton campaign -- who went very hard after his drug use to no avail. When it was clear he was going to the be the nominee, right-wingers immediately started churning out scurrilous books about him, and those authors were given extensive air time on Fox News. During the presidential campaign, there were endless stories about Jeremiah Wright, extensive speculation that Obama had been educated in an Islamic Madrassa , and hundreds, if not thousands of stories about the extent of his relationship with Bill Ayers (famously summed up by Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin when she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists").

Americans looked at all of this chatter and yawned. In November 2008, they promptly gave Obama a higher percentage of the popular vote than Ronald Reagan won in 1980.

Since he was elected, there have been a flurry of even more anti-Obama books accusing him of being corrupt, a "gangster," suggesting that he hates the West because of his "anti-colonial" Kenyan heritage and that he's a "Manchurian president."

Not to mention the fact that there's an entire "news" organization which has, since January 2009, peddled birtherism, hyped phony scandals -- and aired a program that consisted almost exclusively of paranoid right-wing fantasies about the president.

So yes, Obama's been vetted. And if Team Willard really thinks they can win the election by talking about Obama's cocaine use or Rev. Wright -- they are even more clueless than previously thought.