Candidate can't even get opponent right in attack ad

A lot of strange things happen in politics every day, as a regular reader of Raw Story can readily confirm.

But it's not every day that a candidate launches an ad that can't even identify their own opponent.

A Denver TV station announced it had stopped running an ad yesterday after discovering that the ad included a blatantly false statement -- an accusation so false, in fact, that it turned out the candidate launching the ad had mis-identified his own opponent.

"We get these disputes all the time, and they're usually really gray and we can't do anything," station manager Peter Maroney said. "In this case, it was prima facie that there was a screw-up, it seemed so blatantly wrong to me and so black and white, that we went back to the agency that books advertising for Gardner and asked for a response from them."

"Apparently, the ad mistook the vote of Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey, who did vote yes on the budget, for that of Markey, the first-term Democrat who is fighting hard to defend her seat in Colorado's predominantly Republican fourth congressional district," Denver's Fox affiliate wrote.

"Instead of defending the botched ad, Gardner's advertising agent asked FOX 31 to begin airing a separate commercial in its place. The new spot replaced the three seconds in the original ad that referred to the budget vote with other language," the network added.

"There is a plethora of bad votes to highlight, so it was easy to replace," the spokeswoman for the candidate who screwed up, Cory Gardner, said. "Rep. Markey can try to use this to change the subject all she wants, but the fact remains that she has voted for Nancy Pelosi’s job-killing agenda 94 percent of the time, and within her first 50 days in Congress, Rep. Markey recklessly spent a billion dollars an hour, approving $1.2 trillion in new spending."

The real candidate, Betsy Markey, replied with this statement from her spokesman to TPM: "I would point Rep. Gardner to a site on the 'internet' to research his claims a little better: www.google.com. If Rep. Gardner can't figure out how this whole voting system works, how can he be trusted to actually read bills?"

The original -- blatantly wrong -- ad follows.