Executive summary: MSNBC aired a hilarious anti-Hillary Clinton ad. They SAID it’s from Ted Cruz, but they left off all the markings, so who knows?

The ad in question is a spoof of one of the iconic scenes from the movie Office Space. Specifically, it’s the scene where the hero and his two sidekicks steal the perennially-malfunctioning printer/fax that has come to symbolize everything they hate about their jobs, take it out to a field, and then pretty much beat it to death (link SFW, but the NSFW versions are much more satisfying) with a baseball bat while Geto Boys plays in the background.  It’s one of the more satirical scenes in a deeply satirical movie, and you can reasonably expect that anybody that’s my age has seen it.

Now switch in Hillary Clinton for one of the attackers, and a computer server for the printer-fax, and you have the ad. [EDIT: Sorry! Mild profanity warning. Very mild, by today’s standards, but still. – ML]

First look at new @tedcruz ad in SC targeting @HillaryClinton and lampooning classic ‘Office Space’ scene https://t.co/Mu1YI4KJZJ

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) February 12, 2016

Interestingly enough, the only place that this ad is showing up right now is on MSNBC, where they credit it to “Cruz for President” while not providing any of the usual disclaimers/approvals that you should expect from official political ads. Which is interesting. I have no objection at all to this coming from the Ted Cruz campaign; shoot, I would have no objection to this coming from the Donald Trump campaign (it’d make for a refreshing change). I however suspect that this is actually coming from an officially unaffiliated group. Because, after all: right now we’re playing by South Carolina Rules.

And is one of the players MSNBC?  I do not know – and it’s MSNBC’s fault that I don’t.  We put those disclaimers and approvals on the ads for a reason, remember?

Moe Lane

PS: Note, by the way, that this just reiterates that you always have to take what MSNBC does with a grain of salt.  Their video editing was done deliberately. And probably with a specific agenda in mind.  It was actually very subtle; I almost got caught by it.