Steve Stockman Is Having Fun / Lying with Photoshop

Steve Stockman, who is challenging John Cornyn in this year's GOP primary, couldn't find a picture of Cornyn smiling at Obama. So someone on his team made one, repurposing an old photo of Florida's Charlie Crist.

Texas Rep. Steve Stockman, who is challenging Sen. John Cornyn in this year's Republican primary, couldn't find a picture of Cornyn smiling at President Obama. So someone on his team made one, repurposing an old photo of Florida's Charlie Crist.

The odd image was spotted by Politico's Burgess Everett on Stockman's breathless Cornyn Loves Obamacare website. Of the image, which is below, Burgess pointed out that it looked "like Cornyn's face was photoshopped onto Biden's head."

(Update, 3:30 p.m.: The website no longer shows the Photoshopped image. There has been no statement from the Stockman campaign about the switch.)

Right idea; wrong guy. It's actually a 2009 photo of Obama with Crist, who was governor of Florida at the time. Here's the original image, from the Associated Press.

So far, Stockman's campaign for the Senate has been a mix of trying to imply that the staunchly-conservative Cornyn is a liberal and dealing with his own mistakes and misrepresentations. In December, FactCheck declared that Stockman "isn’t letting facts stand in his way" as he asks for donations, easily dismissing the Cornyn-as-liberal motif. Meanwhile, Stockman was forced to pull a set of iffy endorsements from his campaign website, and has failed to explain the nebulous source of his income before he went to Congress.

The (really pretty lousy) Photoshop job isn't the only contrived falsehood on the "Cornyn Loves Obamacare" site. There's also the name of the website.