The voters clearly saw the Mana Movement's Hone Harawira and the Internet Party's Laila Harre were in the end little more than stooges for Dotcom's attempt to "take down" the Key Government.
Harawira couldn't even hold fast to the Mana Movement's policies against the legalisation of cannabis, thus losing ground within his own electorate where he had campaigned persuasively against drug use in the past.
Then there was Laila herself. A serial party flirt (I'm being polite here) who confessed after the election that Internet Mana made a mistake by not distancing itself from Kim Dotcom in the lead-up to the election.
Who can take this post-election justification seriously?
But one day after the election there was Harre saying: "We should have much more proactively withdrawn him from the campaign at an earlier point. In retrospect, we could have been much more vigorous in assessing that. But we also had to weigh up the risk that if we distanced him, that would have become a media story in itself. We were damned if we did, damned if we didn't.
"We were never able to move the Internet Mana identity beyond the Kim Dotcom identity. You only have to look at the news coverage from day one on anything that Kim said or did.
"This isn't about blaming the media. But the media chose only to cover, even when it was sideshow material, events around Kim. There was almost no coverage of Internet-Mana's initiatives."
The brutal reality is that Internet-Mana was always going to be about Dotcom.
It was Dotcom who put Harre and Harawira on his payroll.
It was Dotcom who was the maestro at the "party party" gatherings where students chanted "F*** John Key" under his baton.
Harawira did not openly share Harre's manufactured venom.
But Harre can't have it both ways. By chairing the "Moment of Truth" just days before the election she made it all about Dotcom. It was Harre who vaingloriously said she would make a case to the new government to welcome NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be granted safe passage and residency in New Zealand.
What did this have to do with the Internet Party's policies?
Then yesterday there was the Internet-Mana's incontinent press officer Pam Corkery yet again bleating about the "puffed-up little shits" of telly land in a long-winded justification of her failure to exercise personal discipline at the party's launch.
I like Pam. I cut my teeth in the private radio era of the early 1980s when the late Paul Holmes held sway on Radio Windy and Pam and a whole host of journalists who then went on to develop strong personal brands on the radio were starting off.
But instead of the inside story of what really went down in the Internet Mana soup which we all know Corkery is capable of providing, all we got was more deflection over the party's disastrous defeat.
The upshot was that Hone Harawira failed to win Te Tai Tokerau, and Internet Mana finished on just over 1.2 per cent, well short of the 5 per cent needed to put an MP into Parliament.
The Prime Minister they tried to "take down" is back in the Beehive. Voters saw through the puppet-master and his well-paid politicians.
