The Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential nomination are both off to rocky starts with their online campaigns.

Botched website rollouts, misspellings, copyright infringement and other issues are dogging both Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)’s attempts to establish their online presence for the year and a half of campaigning between now and Election Day.

Literally within hours of Ted Cruz’s announcement that he would be running for the nomination, Internet users found that his campaign had neglected to buy up the proper domain names for its potential website.

Users who went to TedCruz.com were immediately redirected to a blank page that said only, “SUPPORT PRESIDENT OBAMA. IMMIGRATION REFORM NOW!”

The website TedCruzForAmerica.com currently sends visitors to the Obamacare website HealthCare.gov.

Things aren’t going much better for Rand Paul, whose campaign rollout video was yanked by YouTube within 24 hours of its debut for copyright infringement.

According to the Washington Post, the video was flagged because it contained an unauthorized use of the song “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” by country music artist John Rich.

Business Insider noted that the Paul campaign’s official website made a typo in pretty much the worst possible place when they misspelled the word “education.”

And BuzzFeed pointed out on Wednesday that the photos being posted by Paul’s campaign as endorsements from around the country were actually stock photos from a German Shutterstock page. The images have since been taken down.

The Cruz campaign, we suppose, is making these errors because it’s being run by the kind of people who have to get the 10-year-old from across the street to help them out when they forget their AOL passwords. For them, “Twitter” is still just a verb.

Rand Paul, on the other hand, probably has plenty of friends and supporters who understand how to use the Internet, but he just can’t be bothered to do more than the bare minimum on anything, whether its hiring due diligence or even caring enough about a speech he’s giving to make sure it hasn’t been cribbed verbatim from Wikipedia.

Regardless of what causes these men and their teams of presumably lavishly paid advisors to make these types of amateur-hour errors, the GOP will doubtless provide us with endless entertainment in the year and a half ahead. As the rest of the occupants of the Republican clown car empty on to the field and come wobbling online, we will be treated to something akin to the sight of a group of people staggering into the lion cage at the zoo wearing suits made of pork chops.

Bon appetit!

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