Getting The Kerry Treatment
Almost systematic effort to undermine and negatively stereotype almost every Dem that is gaining or stands to gain more visibility and authority in Washington.... For example, where Bush was constant shown pressing the flesh and making eye contact, Kerry was just as often depicted standing apart from people around...
Continue Reading
"They"
The enemy cannot defeat us on the battlefield, but what they can do is put horrible images on our TV screens. --George Bush, Philadelphia Congressional Dinner, May 24, 2006
Continue Reading
In Arlington
There are many funerals and cemeteries in the visual press today. For some reason, however, I was drawn to a video feature on the nyt.com home page titled "Finite Arlington." The piece is narrarated by Andrew C. Revkin, a Times science reporter with a love of music. It shows scenes...
Continue Reading
Field Of Dreams
With the arrival of Memorial Day weekend, the MSM is offering a range of stories on war and soldiering. The NYT has a piece today summarizing where things stand in Afghanistan. The gist of the report is that the situation is slowly getting away from Western forces. Just one...
Continue Reading
Performance Problems? Or, No Longer That Kind Of Guy?
Here's where I'm a little confused about this cover. The illustration equates the loss of virility with the failure of Bush's aggressive and adventurist policies. With Bush's more moderate stance on immigration, however, and now the admission that his macho attitude was a central failing in prosecuting the war,...
Continue Reading
What Your Average GOP Congressman Has On His Mind
What Your Average GOP Congressman Has On His Mind....
Continue Reading
What Fifty Interviews And A Dollar Buys You These Days
50 interviews!?! More power to Digby for calling out the NYT for their impersonation of the Nat Inquirer (story link) and to Media Matters for unveiling authorial double standards. It's one thing to tear at the Clinton marriage on the front page, but what would would persuade them...
Continue Reading
TIME's Three Year Old Cover
Beyond the hostile and misogynist tone of this week's cover article, it's hard to understand what's going on with this cover. It might have made sense three years ago after Natalie Maines unloaded on Bush on the eve of the Iraq war and had to deal with overwhelming condemnation...
Continue Reading
Acting Lessons
What's wrong with this picture (besides my little tweak to it)? And why is Bush getting mostly a free pass for his praise of the new Iraqi government? It's not an exact analogy, but try this on...
Continue Reading
Seeing The Unseen, Fifty Years Later
News photographer Robert Adams captured this moment as Shuttlesworth was attempting to enter a whites-only waiting room at the Birmingham Terminal Station on March 6, 1957.... Just a few years after this picture was made, Birmingham’s black citizens would be tortured by Bull Connor’s police dogs, slammed into brick...
Continue Reading
Your Turn: Fill 'Er Up
I showed this to four people. They each loved it -- but I got five interpretations as to what it meant. Want to try? (image: Anita Kunz/The New Yorker.
Continue Reading
High Tech And Off The Wall
That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp.... And even if most of the $425 million spend over the past ten years was wasted on border technology that wasn't...
Continue Reading
Saturday Versus Monday Night Live
The Oval Office was on center stage this week, not just for Bush's immigration speech, but also Al Gore's appearance on Saturday Night Live.... Before the official broadcast, NBC cued Bush to begin, which created an awkward false start to the speech.... The small glitch, however, was indicative of...
Continue Reading
Same As It Ever Was
Trying to get a handle on Tuesday's key political image, The BAG only encountered more right wing demoralization.... Besides the obsessive and perverse replay of this necroporn at FOX News, however -- as if out of nostalgia for the heady "smoke 'em out of their hole" days -- the...
Continue Reading
La Evidencia Conclusiva (The Smoking Gun)
Is the Republican center-right coalition finally imploding? For months now, anti-immigration wingnuts have been thrashing about in search of a 2000 campaign video of Bush waving the Mexican flag. Then, what do you know? The footage stealthily turns up — just a matter of hours before Bush’s immigration address...
Continue Reading
McCain Watch: Fall Well, Fall Often
Documenting his brown-nosing trip down to Liberty U., the shot that got the most play this weekend was this one, with Johnny Mac turning deferentially to the aging, but still central Falwell.
Continue Reading
Humble Pie
Anxious to get a handle on the war in Iran, Iraq and Southern Turkey, President Powell and Vice President Albright sit down with members of the previous Administration to figure out what the hell they were thinking. Unfortunately, one was too rueful to participate; one didn't remember anything; and...
Continue Reading
Your Turn: Mirror, Mirror On (Or Off) The Wall
This new ABC/WAPO poll, for example, shows public support for surveillance of personal telephone records to assess traffic patterns by a 2-1 margin.... As a conservative bastion, the Washington Times ran the image above in yesterday's story titled: "Bush Denies Report Of 'Trolling' By NSA."... Intuitively, the image seems...
Continue Reading