Sting videos just ain’t what they used to be. James O’Keefe just released one, with great fanfare, that allegedly showed “illegal activity conducted by high-level employees within Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.” What the video actually showed was a Project Veritas operator purchasing $75 of Hillary Clinton campaign swag and giving it to a Canadian.

In the five-minute video, a Project Veritas member approached the booth at the event on New York’s Roosevelt Island alongside an apparent Canadian citizen, who Project Veritas says it did not know but was in line with by “pure happenstance.”

The Canadian citizen asked if she could purchase some campaign gear. The campaign staff at the booth — which included Director of Marketing Molly Barker and Compliance Manager Erin Tibe — informed her that since she was not a U.S. citizen, she could not legally contribute to the campaign. The undercover Project Veritas member then offers to take the Canadian woman’s cash and make the contribution for her.

The video then jumps to a printout of Federal Election Commission laws, which prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to a campaign, directly or indirectly.

“Molly Barker broke the law by allowing our journalist to become the middleman,” the video says.

I watched the video. You can clearly hear the Clinton campaign staffers telling the Canadian woman she could not purchase Clinton hats and T-shirts unless she is a U.S. citizen. They asked if she had a U.S. passport or even a green card. She did not. Then the O’Keefe operative piped up and argued with them, saying the woman had come all the way from Canada to support Hillary. Then when the Canadian herself appeared to be ready to leave, the operative offered to buy stuff for the Canadian. When the operative asked if she would be allowed to do that, the Clinton staffer clarified that “you [which I take to mean the operative] would just be making a contribution to the Clinton campaign.” Then later, the Clinton staffer said that if it weren’t for federal law they would accept donations from foreigners. The video plays this up as if the staffer had said something shocking.

That’s it. That’s the “sting.” Reporters were, um, underwhelmed.

(Earlier this week, Scott Walker was reported to have said that building a fence along the Canadian border was an idea worth reviewing. I say that if politics here gets any crazier, Canada might build it.)

Oliver Willis wrote,

Project Veritas last month released a video showing their operative undercover with the Clinton campaign, discussing the registration process and whether they can register people who don’t support Clinton.

A Clinton campaign staffer is then shown telling the Project Veritas operative that they will register anyone who asks, regardless of their presidential preference. As Time reported, “Nothing in the video shows the Clinton campaign violating the law, or the campaign’s own policy. But Veritas claims, nonetheless, that the campaign is ‘skirting the law’ by first asking whether potential voters are supporters before making the registration offer. This approach to training volunteers is standard operating procedure across field campaigns, according to a Republican field staffer, who requested anonymity.”

Well, so much for that. The crew of anti-reproductive rights extremists releasing the scam Planned Parenthood videos has another one out, and this time it appears the scammers are confused about the mechanics of pregnancy.

This video actually targets Advanced Bioscience Resources, Inc., which the Fetus People call “the small and secretive company that has harvested and sold fetal body parts at Planned Parenthood clinics longer than any other entity.” ABR is a non-profit foundation that provides human tissue for scientific research. According to the Fetus People, an ABR “procurer” told a prospective “buyer” that getting an intact fetus is easy; they find a woman in an advanced stage of cervical dilation, and the fetus just “falls out.” Later in their press release the Fetus People called this a “second trimester” operation, meaning that any cervical dilation would have been induced, a point overlooked in the press release. WebMD explains how dilation is used in second trimester abortions; the fetus doesn’t “fall out.”

FYI, independent analysis has shown that even the “unedited videos released by these clowns have been doctored.

Glenn Simpson, a partner at the firm and a former Wall Street Journal reporter, assembled three teams of neutral experts to comb through the tapes using special video software. He said the teams found that all of the videos analyzed — even the supposedly “full,” unedited footage the CMP released — were missing large sections of time and misleadingly altered so that separate conversations appeared to take place in an uninterrupted take. Moreover, the forensic team found that the transcripts CMS released with the videos were frequently erroneous.

“It appears they commit what I would call ‘wishful thinking’ about what was said,” Simpson told reporters Thursday.

The videos show Planned Parenthood doctors discussing the donation of fetal tissue after abortions — a legal practice. But the CMP edited the videos into episodes that make it look as though Planned Parenthood is selling fetal parts for profit and changing abortion methods to deliver intact specimens. The family planning provider strongly denies both charges, and five separate state investigations into Planned Parenthood have cleared the organization of any wrongdoing.

Simpson said his team of experts found that the subtitles in the videos do not correspond to the actual dialogue, and that the CMP may have simply invented parts of the conversation when the recordings were too low-quality to determine what was really being said.

But, y’know, it’s all about the propaganda. A pollster is claiming that 54 percent of Republican voters think President Obama is a Muslim, so we’re not talking about advanced critical thinkers here. They’ll believe whatever they are told to believe.