In case it hasn’t yet invaded your TV, here is Mary Landrieu’s new ad touting her vigorous and aggressive defense of the energy industry – which almost immediately after it made its debut began getting torn to pieces for its dishonest presentation…

The Weekly Standard descended upon the ad like a pack of vultures on a rotting corpse…

Most of the clips the ad features are from her appearances on local and cable TV news. But watch the clips of Landrieu around the video’s halfway point. They feature the senator speaking in what looks like a congressional hearing, excoriating a faceless witness. “They have to sit here and listen to the federal government say, ‘We can’t share a penny with you’? I will not rest until this injustice is fixed,” Landrieu says. “Do you think there are a bunch of fairy godmothers out there who just wave a magic wand?”

The clips feature a chyron at the bottom of the screen for a program called “Eye on Washington.” Below that is the headline, “Obama administration says it won’t support increased oil and gas revenue sharing.” The problem is that the video clip doesn’t come from C-SPAN or any other real TV show. In fact, the clip is a reenactment of a real committee hearing from last year, viewable here. The relevant lines that Landrieu recreated for the campaign ad begin at about 2 hours and 30 minutes into the video.

As it turns out, they had to do the re-enactment of the committee hearing because Landrieu came off sounding like a clown at the real thing…

The reenactment fixes a verbal flub from Landrieu’s original speech. Originally, she said “Do you think there are a bunch of fairy godmothers out there that just wish a magic wand?” The line is cleaned up for the campaign ad.

There are clues from the ad that the clips of her talking tough on energy are from a reenactment. Landrieu is wearing a different jacket and has a different haircut. Her nameplate that reads “Sen. Landrieu” is a larger size, and the aides sitting behind her are different, in a room that is clearly not the Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing room.

It was inevitable that Buzzfeed would drop in to gnaw on a bone or two, complete with GIF’s and memes…

The remake goes hilariously out of its way to recreate the hearing.

The Buzzfeed post gets a kick out of the ad for more than just the obviously fake re-enactment, which it notes is using the wrong font on Landrieu’s nameplate, has a chyron which is not from any news network and has Landrieu wearing a different blue jacket than she did in the original hearing.

It gets amusing when Buzzfeed starts tearing the ad up for the little cringe-inducing details found in it. Behold, the GIF’s…

“…these guys apparently love watching Senate hearings.”

And then, this…

“As does this guy while he drinks Gatorade, dramatically.”

A little more…

“Everyone else in Louisiana watches Landrieu on MSNBC.”

And finally…

“Including these guys.” Not sure if that means this is the same guy.

The point is, when your ad gets torn apart immediately you’re wasting whatever money you’re spending on it. And Landrieu was supposed to be blowing through a couple of million dollars on an ad that didn’t last a day before it’s a laughingstock.

Not great.

Meanwhile, the National Republican Senatorial Committee offered up their own narrative about the ad…

“We’re not sure that a United States Senator has ever done such a bizarre reenactment of a floor speech or committee hearing for a television ad. The truth is that in this footage Mary Landrieu is talking tough to an empty chair, not anyone in the Obama Administration. If Mary Landrieu cared about being honest with voters in Louisiana, she’d appropriately label the footage as a dramatization or a reenactment, especially since she has actually voted with President Obama 97 percent of the time – a fact which deeply undercuts the entire spot. 

“The last ad run on Landrieu’s behalf in Louisiana was heavily criticized by fact checker at the Washington Post, who wrote that ‘Television stations in Louisiana should be ashamed of falling for such an obvious gambit. …Surely, the standards for political advertising in Louisiana need to be higher if residents are going to have a civil political debate.’  Voters deserve truth in advertising and it is our hope that Senator Landrieu takes the appropriate steps to edit this ad to ensure its accuracy.”

It’s a little dry, and probably could have used more ridicule.

But when Buzzfeed is making GIF’s, one supposes you can play Dean Martin to their Jerry Lewis. In any event, nobody’s really going to get the message of how tough Mary is on Obama when they’re too busy trying to find that ad at Rotten Tomatoes.