Give Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly credit for clinging to her "political outlook" -- widespread debunking of a highly misleading political ad won't stop her from using it to smear President Obama.

During a segment about Republican attacks on Obama's “patriotism” and “faith in America,” Kelly featured an ad from the Rick Perry campaign criticizing Obama for “supposedly insulting Americans and calling them lazy.” She later said:

KELLY: [I]t's interesting to hear the president say that it's the pundits, and the newspapers, and the TV commentators who love to talk about how America is slipping, when, you know, we have examples like this, from the president himself. Watch it.

OBAMA [video clip]: There are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity -- our stability, our openness, our innovative free market culture -- but you know we've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We've kind of taken for granted, well, people will want to come here, and we aren't out there hungry, selling America

However, the comments that Kelly cited as an “example” of Obama talking about how “America is slipping,” and the Perry ad she played, were widely criticized more than two weeks ago for taking the president out of context. The Associated Press, ABC News' Devin Dwyer, NBC News' Mark Murray, The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog, and The New York Times' Caucus blog, among others, all reported that this attack on Obama is misleading and distorts his words.

As FactCheck.org wrote:

Republican presidential candidates Rick Perry and Mitt Romney both claim President Barack Obama said that “Americans are lazy.” He didn't. To the contrary, Obama has consistently and repeatedly praised American workers as the “most productive in the world,” a bit of boosterism he has repeated dozens of times.

His recent words -- “we've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades” -- actually referred to collective efforts to promote foreign investment in the U.S., and not to American workers or voters as individuals. Perry and Romney simply rip those words out of their context in order to mislead.

And contrary to Kelly's suggestion, Obama is correct that it's commentators and TV pundits who insult Americans as lazy; right-wing media figures routinely portray certain segments of the American people, particularly the poor, the unemployed, and union workers, as lazy.

It's hardly a surprise that Kelly would try to revive a weeks-old, debunked smear to attack Obama; for weeks in 2010, she was the prime driving force behind the phony New Black Panthers scandal.