Today seems to be a day of days when it comes to political whackadoodlery.

The 2020 Presidential election, more than a year away, is already weird enough, what with Gropey Joe and all the rest so far refusing to denounce left wing violence in Portland. But it’s getting even weirder: it seems that during the recent televised Dem debates, *somebody* used real-time computer AI video trickery to either add or subtract a pimple to Tulsi Gabbard’s chin:

On one hand… it’s kinda silly. On the other hand, the ability to create a “deep fake” videos IN REAL TIME is more than a little disturbing.

Chin pimple suddenly disappears during presidential debate

The easiest explanation is that the pimple was real and a filter was applied to “erase” it and the filter failed from time to time. But then… isn’t that what makeup is for? Using digital trickery for “good” is only going to cause people’s conspiracy senses to tingle.

But Tulsi Gabbard is on record claiming that she had no such pimple, and called for an investigation. It seems like a lame thing for a major organization like NBC News to digitally add a pimple to someone; if this was done, I’d bet that the cause was lower down the totem pole. Perhaps little more than a tech having fun with his new Add-A-Pimple App. But that might be even worse. Bad enough if it takes a billion dollar corporation working in cahoots with a political party to pull this off; but if one guy working by his lonesome can do this, then we stand on the edge of what has long been inevitable: complete lack of trust in *any* form of news gathering. Because we are about fifteen minutes away from video being utterly untrustworthy.