Political Smears That Backfired Wildly

5 GOP Candidate Goes After Parkland Survivors, Destroys His Career

In the aftermath of the mass shooting at Parkland, Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which left 17 people dead, several survivors began vocally campaigning for gun control all across the country. One of them was student Emma Gonzalez, who made several high-profile media appearances, spoke at prominent gun control rallies, and otherwise pissed several conservatives the hell off -- including bigot Congressman Steve King, discount Patrick Bateman Donald Trump Jr., and Leslie Gibson.

"Leslie, who?" you're wondering. Precisely. You see a month after the shooting, Gibson attacked Gonzalez on Twitter, calling her a "skinhead lesbian" before adding "There is nothing that she has to say unless you're frothing at the mouth moonbat," a statement so confusing that we double-checked to make sure wasn't actually mistranslated anime dialogue.

People and the media immediately shamed Gibson for his attack on Gonzalez's sexuality -- but Gibson was a modern conservative politician, so saying inflammatory things and getting yelled at over them is all part of the handbook. Except at the time, Gibson was running unopposed for a seat in the Maine House of Representatives. And while we're not political strategists or anything, it's generally a bad idea for someone without an opponent to anger a load of people on both sides of the political aisle.

Within days of Gibson's remarks, the Democratic and Republicans parties had both fielded a candidate against him. Gibson stuck by his guns (literal) but dropped out days later, as he realized he was as welcome in the election as froth in the mouth of a moonbat. In his closing remarks, he said that he was leaving his post with his "head held high," which surprised us because last we checked and it was pretty firmly stuck up his ass.

4 James O'Keefe Has Become a Laughing Stock

Conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe rose to prominence for his selectively-edited takedown of ACORN, a government-funded NGO that advises low-income residents about everything from welfare to housing to healthcare. Yeah, he's that kind of an asshole. However, that was in 2009 -- since then O'Keefe largely spends his days tripping up over his dick.

In 2010, for instance, he attempted to 'sting' CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau, casting her as a sex-addled lunatic by luring her aboard a floating "pleasure palace" filled with sex toys, condoms, erotic paintings, and a video camera. As O'Keefe described in a piece-to-camera he recorded before Boudreau's arrival, the transcript of which reads like an incel's manifesto:

"Instead of giving her a serious interview, I'm going to punk CNN. Abbie has been trying to seduce me to use me, in order to spin a lie about me. So, I'm going to seduce her, on camera, to use her for a video. This bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who comes on at five will get a taste of her own medicine, she'll get seduced on camera and you'll get to see the awkwardness and the aftermath."

Except as soon as Boudreau pulled up outside the boat, an O'Keefe staffer warned her about the sting and the whole thing had to be abandoned (We're sure Operation: James Loses His Virginity would have gone off without a hitch otherwise). The whole fiasco got out to the media, leaving O'Keefe a laughing stock. Later, that same year, O'Keefe was arrested after he and several colleagues snuck into the office of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. They posed as telephone repairmen in an attempt to bug her phone lines -- which is a federal offense for reasons that should be pretty damn obvious.

In 2016, under the banner of 'Project Veritas' (dork), O'Keefe attempted to sting the philanthropic organization operated by the billionaire, conservative boogeyman, and not-a-Nazi George Soros. O'Keefe left a voicemail in which he -- under a fake name of 'Victor Kesh' -- posed as a foreign national "fighting for European values." A super basic, low-effort, attempt to entrap Soros' organization into saying something that O'Keefe could spin as being sinister and shady (Soros isn't good enough for the Love Boat plan, James?). But O'Keefe couldn't even pull that off without crapping the bed -- as he forgot to hang up, and left behind a seven-minute-long voicemail of him and a colleague describing their plan to sting Soros in great detail like the dumbest Bond villains imaginable. "What needs to happen someone other than me to make a hundred phone calls like that," said "Kesh".

And hits are still coming. In November 2017, The Washington Post busted O'Keefe's group for trying to run a con on them whereby a woman, Jaime Phillips, presented herself as a victim of sex monster and creep-ass politician Roy Moore. Their end goal was to get the Post to publish a fake story that could then be used to discredit all of the mainstream media's reporting about Roy Moore.

Unfortunately for O'Keefe, this wasn't the Post's first day and they quickly discovered several odd things about Phillips' story -- as well as a GoFundMe campaign that she set up to raise funds to go work for Project Veritas and "combat the lies and deceit of the liberal MSM." A campaign which, apparently, involves stanning alleged sexual predators. The Washington Post told Phillips to kick rocks and splashed a story about the failed sting over their frontpage. Meaning, in the end, O'Keefe technically did play a part in exposing dishonest media frauds.

3 Mitch McConnell's Cocaine Cargo Ship

Mitch McConnell is what happens when a Ninja Turtle gets raised by Mr. Burns from The Simpsons instead of Splinter.

When coal tycoon Don Blankenship ran for one of West Virginia's US Senate seats, he decided to kill two birds with one stone and take out GOP senate leader McConnell too. With all that legitimate dirt waiting to be dug, what did Blankenship choose to run with as his primary form of attack? He accused McConnell of having his own cocaine ship.

A little backstory: In August 2014, the Colombian Navy boarded a cargo ship in its water, the Ping May, and found 90 pounds of cocaine hidden inside. During the election, Blankenship straight-up accused "Cocaine Mitch" of not only owing the Ping May, but being responsible for the cocaine onboard -- which Blankenship, presumably channeling all the crime knowledge he picked up while doing one-year of hard time, valued at $7 million (Which is why you should really be getting your cocaine in bulk at Costco).

Except, the boat isn't owned by McConnell. It's owned by a shell company, which is owned by the Foremost Group, a shipping conglomerate owned by his in-laws, and even if that game of degrees of separation were damaging, there was absolutely no evidence of whose nose said cocaine was destined to arrive at.

Nonetheless, McConnell leaned into the sheer insanity of this attack with such a sense of humor that he almost briefly passed for having a soul. He began selling "Cocaine Mitch" merchandise. To this day, McConnell's $35 "Cocaine Mitch" shirts remain his best-selling item, and as of writing, have bought in over $70,000 in donations to his campaign.

2 Jacob Wohl Tried (And Fails) to Take Down Several Democrats With Improbable Sex Scandals

Throughout his presidency (and even before), Donald Trump has found himself at the center of several sex scandals. To his supporters, these accusations are just a blanket of lies weaved from horseshit. But, as it turns out, it's a lot harder to wholesale manufacture a sex scandal than you might think -- as evidenced by the frankly innumerable failures of the dumbest little boy in opposition grifting, Jacob Wohl.

Across the last two years, Wohl has leveled accusations of sex scandals against several high-profile politicians -- like Robert Mueller, accused of sexual misconduct via a fake intelligence agency whose staffers include Wohl, Wohl's mom, and a stock photo of Christoph Waltz. There was also the time congresswoman Ilhan Omar was accused of marrying her brother by Wohl and fellow grifter Laura Loomer -- ending with the two live-streaming themselves pretending to be scared that Omar was about to assassinate them.

Wohl also has trotted out his weird brand of fan-fic for the Democratic presidential field. There's Pete Buttigieg, whom Whol accused of sexual assault after paying a man to, um, say that exact thing. Then there's Kamala Harris, whom he accused of having an extra-marital affair. Finally, there's Wohl's magnum opus -- his accusal of Elizabeth Warren injuring a (fake) ex-Marine during some kinky dominatrix sex.

1 Trolls Try to Take Down AOC With a Fake Nude, It Gets Debunked By An Eagle-Eyed Foot Fetishist

If there's anything that gets the right-wing riled up, it's the continued existence of popular, working-class, Latinx congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Since entering office, there have been countless attempts to smear AOC such as a video of her *gasp* dancing, or her *double gasp* wearing clothes. But there's been no more impressive failure to land a shot than the time they tried to take down her with a fake nude.

In January 2019, an image was posted to Reddit, claiming to be from AOC's Instagram, showing the congresswoman vaping and the scant reflection of her breasts in a faucet. Cue the miraculous appearance of Reddit user jokes_on_you, who leaped into the thread to call out the image as fake.

He did so with a quick comparison of the fake AOC's feet and a known photo of the real AOC's feet taken from the foot fetish "research database," Wikifeet (Which we will definitely not be linking to). "I've sucked enough toes in my life to recognize when something doesn't look right," he said in an interview with Vice. "Because we can't our 2nd-5th toes independently I knew it wasn't a matter of the toe being bent. I thought that maybe she has some form of brachydactyly but her Wikifeet page has clear evidence to the contrary. So it was clear to me that it wasn't her feet."

But who did the feet, boobs, and vape pen actually belong to? They were those of Sydney Leathers, the adult model/actress from the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, who at this point has become the Forrest Gump of weird sexting political ordeals.

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