Background

During this year's Republican primary, Evan Jenkins' senate campaign took some "creative license" (as one of his spokespersons put it at the time) and photoshopped two different images to come up with a picture of his opponent, Patrick Morrisey, shaking the hand of Hillary Clinton. The image was then used in a widely-shown commercial.

This ad from GOP Senate candidate Evan Jenkins, photoshopping a picture like this to make it look like a primary opponent shook hands with Clinton instead of Trump is extraordinary dishonest.https://t.co/APF0f5YV9f pic.twitter.com/YbHI17442j

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) May 2, 2018

Of course, Morrisey was rightfully indignant:

Despicable @EvanJenkinsWV photoshopped my photo with @realDonaldTrump and substituted it with Hillary, who I have always strongly opposed. Will the media call out Jenkins for his lying and dishonesty? Where is the accountability as this liar tries to deceive voters? #wvsen pic.twitter.com/Od2YxpXOzz

— AG Patrick Morrisey (@MorriseyWV) April 28, 2018

Since then, Jenkins has failed upwards and now sits on the West Virginia Supreme Court. (I guess our Republican governor views replacing an unethical justice with an unethical Republican politician as an improvement. "Ethically-challenged" is apparently in the job description.)

Ryan Ferns' re-election Facebook page revisited

On Saturday I blogged about our local Republican state senator's Facebook re-election page and briefly discussed three of the images at the top of page.* (See next post down.) I researched the first picture that captured Fern's Democratic opponent, William Ihlenfeld, talking to Hillary Clinton and suggested that I could not find the picture anywhere and that it was probably a photoshopped combination of a couple of images. (I included what I believed was the Ihlenfeld half of the photo.)

Yesterday, I decided to research the picture of Ihlenfeld and Obama in front of a group of protesting coal miners. Here is the picture:

For starters, note that the foreground is in color while the background in black and white suggesting the photo has been assembled from different pictures. I found the background part of the photo (protesting miners) in the Washington Examiner. Here's the original without the presence of either Ihlenfeld or Obama.

I then went looking for Obama and quickly realized that there are a gazillion pictures of Obama in the Bing and Google search engines. However, I quickly found an exact match on the Ihlenfeld picture. Rather than simply showing the photo, I've included a screen shot of the newspaper article that featured the picture to explain the reason for the photo.

Yes, same posture, same smile, same tie. The accompanying article in the Clarksburg Exponent begins:

CLARKSBURG — U.S. Attorney William J. Ihlenfeld II will resign from his position on Dec. 31 after serving the Northern District of West Virginia for more than six years, after honing in on the drug epidemic, as well as health care and financial crimes throughout the state.

For his efforts to reduce crime and make the community safer, Ihlenfeld has been named Public Servant of the Year by The Exponent Telegram’s Editorial Board.

(A nice touch -- photoshopping an image of Ihlenfeld being honored.)

Back to Morrisey

Back in April, Morrisey wanted the media to cover "despicable" Jenkins' actions:

Will the media call out Jenkins for his lying and dishonesty? Where is the accountability as this liar tries to deceive voters?

Some national news sources did cover Jenkins' actions. As for Ferns, I wouldn't expect any coverage from Ogden on this one.

• Note - these images are now further down the page.