BAGnewsNotes

So, So?

PRESIDENT KARZAI: (Speaking English.) Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, very nice of you. Any more questions?

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: No, I'm fine.

Q: Oh.

PRESIDENT KARZAI: You're disappointed? One more question. Don't disappoint the press ever.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Don't disappoint the press ever. (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT KARZAI: Please, ma'am.

I think I've become anesthetized not just to the mind-bending arrogance of Dick Cheney, but to the tendency of the media to either giggle, or simply look away.

Because of this passive acceptance, I barely registered the rare comeuppance Dick received from Karzai last week when he tried to cut short their joint press conference.  (Keeping with the theme of denial, you might check out the self-serving do-over on the White House photo gallery, in which the event was entirely reframed to highlight Dick's eagerness to answer questions.  ...And this was only days after the 60 Minutes interview in which Dick dismissed the American public's opinion on the war with a "So?")

Why I'm bringing this up at all, however, is because of the shot I saw last evening on Reuters Pic of the Day.

Shaking me out of the "Dick as comedy" stupor was this photo from Turkey of a protester expressing himself over Dick's impending arrival.  What it did was point out how someone somewhere was not only still paying attention, but would be so muted for the rebuttal.

Vice President Dick Cheney smiles as a reporter asks a question during a press availability with President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai" (White House Photo Gallery)
Reuters Pictures of the Day
Cheney/Karzai press conference (White House transcript)
Cheney On Two-Thirds Of The American Public Opposing The Iraq War: ‘So?’ (Think Progress)

(image 1: Rafiq Maqbool/AP.  Kabul.  March 20, 2008. YahooNews.  image 2: Stringer.  Ankara. March 24, 2008. reuters.co.uk. )

Clarence Thomas: Cover For Paranoia

The photo and layout of the Harper Collins Clarence Thomas memoir gets it about right.  (It's a portrait of disorder.)

(image: Deborah Feingold.  Harper Collins. 2007)

General "Betray Us": FOX Gets On It ...Gratis

You can tell Campaign '08 is well under way now, given the vicious attacks on MoveOn for daring to question the political independence of General Petraeus.

As coordinated and vengeful as the broadsides are, however, what is even more disturbing is the willing role played by the media to provide validation and exposure.  Take this report last evening at The Caucus, for example.  Previewing the controversy surrounding Bush's non-speech on Iraq, the NYT blog juxtaposed, in equal significance, John Boehner's statement that the war was "a small price to pay" (whether that implied lives lost and injured, as many on the left claimed, or simply dollars) and the false-loyalty test the right was trying to force on Democratic candidates relative to their "stance" on the Move-On ad.

Meanwhile, the screen shot above provides an interesting counterpoint to remarks made yesterday by chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, Tom Cole.  Mr. Cole attacked the NYT for supposedly offering the non-profit MoveOn a preferential price for the full page ad.

Said Cole, as quoted in the NYT:

The New York Times is free to run any ad it chooses at any price, though there is good reason to believe that giving MoveOn.org’s Political Action Committee preferential pricing may violate F.E.C. regulations. It is fair to ask whether organizations espousing a pro-administration or conservative point of view have ever been offered comparable discounts. Certainly no reputable electronic media outlet would charge candidates, political parties or advocacy groups different rates for the same commercial time.

Gee, Tom.  Given the role FOX News plays as the Administration's broadcast arm, and here, the absolutely free mouthpiece for the MoveOn backlash, it seems a surprise that the progressive organization (which reported paying $65,000 for the ad) would have been charged anything at all.

Re: the image more specifically, it seems we owe a debt of gratitude to Jon Stewart (building on the work of SNL News, and many others) for ultimately severing the old reflexive visual association that a guy sitting behind a news desk on national TV somehow deserves any form of consideration or deference, or conveys even a shred objectivity.

... Meanwhile, given all the fat but so little meat served up last week, isn't Francisco Franco still dead?

(image: Kevin Wolf/AP.  September 10, 2007. Washington. via YahooNews.  Caption: Brit Hume, right, talks with Gen. David Petraeus about a Moveon.org ad during an interview on FOX News on Monday)

Fighting in the Trenches

by John Lucaites

In the “Great War,” cultural historian Paul Fussell writes about trench warfare as a troglodyte world in which the soldier experiences an “unreal, unforgettable enclosure and constraint, as well as a sense of being unoriented  and lost.”  He concludes that “the drift of modern history domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable.”

This quotation came to mind this past week when I encountered this photograph, which led off a Washington Post slideshow of Senator Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia) visiting the troops at Ft. Benning during the recent summer recess.

According to the caption, the senator “takes part in virtual reality firearms training.”  He does this, mind you, while still wearing a suit and tie, though he’s taken off his jacket, presumably to give himself a bit more flexibility to engage the “enemy.”

Wingnuts Looking The Part -- For A Change

Surely, you're familiar with that power-tripping phrase: "Are you going to believe me, or your own eyes?"

This Administration has consistently avoided judgement by defying expected norms of reaction and standard emotional cause-and-effect.

... What that means is, if a guy does wrong and that wrong catches up to him, we are neurologically wired to expect a certain type of behavioral response.  That reaction -- be it oral and tonal, or facial and gestural -- could be anything within a familiar spectrum, ranging from contrition or shame on one end to defensiveness or defiance on the other.  The completely subversive thing about this Administration, however, is that, with as much damage as they've done, one would barely recognize it because the physical and emotional indicators the key players display bears so little sign of impertinence toward laws, ethics, and moral standards, or much hiccup, at all, at the level of personal conscience.

That's why it's such a relief to me to see Senator Craig in these mug shots.

Craig's expression, playing out below or just short of the camera eye, appears to say "I'm not here.  ... And because I don't see you, I'm expecting (in my little bubble) you won't see me."  In the profile, his gaze appears downward.  Accordingly, we (as creatures each equipped with a set of emotional antennae) are trained to consider -- through instinctive, psychological pattern recognition -- a set vocabulary of corresponding emotions.  Likely in the expressive mix -- and easier to recognize if you happened to listen to "Larry on tape" yesterday -- are qualities of shame, denial and rationalization.

Extreme narcissists, like sociopaths, however, just don't come with that kind of emotional programming.  So while the world, based on their direct actions, could be on its way down in flames, what you are likely to see, even if judgement day is closing in on them, is a completely incongruous disconnect between the actor, his actions and his reactions.

Unfortunately for the country, the fact that you can get a mug like the one DeLay provided for his perp portrait, or ones like this or these, in the face of blatant wrongdoing and rampant abuse of power, sends a psychological signal, at a deep cognitive level, that nothing seems so wrong.

(image 1: Harris County Sheriff's Office/Handout/Reuters. October 20, 2005. Via YahooNews.  image 2: Metropolitan Airports Commission Police Department/Handout/Reuters)

Rumsfeld's Memo: The Larger Picture

If the Rumsfeld memo moved through the media like a sonic wave, shattering any last doubt this Administration could conduct a war, there was even more to the piece of paper than that.

What the LA Times photo editors picked up on, in choosing this spot-on photo to accompany their story, is what Rumsfeld and this Administration are good at instead.  If you read the memo, what you see (besides a scratch list of one-to-two-line random and contradictory ideas) is a prevailing concern for spinning, not winning.

In the following excerpts, notice how Rumsfeld's mind is focused as much or more on the perception of the policy, as it is on the policy itself.  (Italics mine).

"Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them)...."

"Publicly announce a set of benchmarks agreed to by the Iraqi government and the U.S. — political, economic and security goals — to chart a path ahead for the Iraqi government and Iraqi people (to get them moving) and for the U.S. public (to reassure them that progress can and is being made)."

And what about this one (which the phrase "stay the course" practically an indictable offense).  Rumsfeld writes:

"Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis... This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not 'lose.' "

Don't you just love that "whatever?"

Here's what the memo confirms:  Rummy's style as Defense Secretary was just to wing it.  And to obfuscate that fact, he was well practiced in the art of misdirection -- and cliche.  (So, who put our hands on the bicycle seat, exactly, and who couldn't figure out how to pull up his socks?)

... But then, as long as the American people felt that real progress was being made, all Donald had to do was stand there and gesture while, below the radar, he "went minimalist" and keep it all stealth.

(image: AFP / Getty Images.  File photo. Published December 3, 2006. latimes.com)

Return To Haifa Street

The AP is using photographers who have relationships with the terrorists; this is for the purpose of helping to tell the terrorists' "stories." The photographers don't have to swear allegiance to the terrorists--gosh, that's reassuring--but they have "family and tribal relations" with them. And they aren't embedded--I'm not sure I believe that--but they don't need to be either, since the terrorists tip them off when they are about to commit an act that they want filmed.

- Michelle Malkin, April 2005 regarding AP photographers in Iraq

One day it's AP, the next it's Reuters.  It's not often I am the defender of the wire services, but I am when the Rathergate crowd rises up in an attempt to corner the market on the practice of photo analysis.

In light of the hysteria about widespread photo staging and doctoring from the right wing (what lgf has cleverly branded the "Fauxtography Scandal"), Eric Boehlert had a wonderfully sober piece yesterday at HuffPo casting a historical light on our authoritative friends.

The date was December '04 and the right wing was getting steamed up about the supposedly anti-American bias among the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winners for Breaking News Photography.  Of particular concern was one award winning shot depicting the execution-style murder of two Iraqi election officials on Haifa Street in Baghdad.  The right had become convinced that the photographer must have been an insurgent sympathizer.  How else, for example, could he have been in just the right place at the right time, and have gotten as close as he did to the actual event.

Sound familiar?

For a sample of how familiar the moral outrage and authoritativeness sounds, here's a snippet from Powerline on December 25, 2004. (Link.)  (Maybe the real tip off in suspecting this kind of "analysis," however, is that someone apparently didn't have anything better to do on Christmas.)

Powerlines states:

We have written a couple of times about the accusations of complicity with terrorists in Iraq.... The issue relates to the shocking photo, recently published by the AP, showing three terrorists in the act of murdering two Iraqi election workers on a street during daylight. The photographer was obviously within a few yards of the scene of the murder, which raises obvious questions, such as 1) what was the photographer doing there; did he have advance knowledge of the crime, or was he even accompanying the terrorists? and 2) why did the photographer apparently have no fear of the terrorists, or conversely, why were the terrorists evidently unconcerned about being photographed in the commission of a murder?

The photo above is the Haifa Street image exactly as featured on Michelle Malkins' site. (The original Pulitzer shot was much bigger, and was probably the model the conservatives were working from).    Just below, however, is a  different version of the image.  This one is featured on deadparrots.net, and (according to Parrot) was previously offered on YahooNews.  (It's likely, the pic was overly reduced.  Still, the main point  -- irrelevant of scale -- is the suddenly increase in distance between the photographer and the scene.)

How could the photographer have gotten "so close" to the actual event?  In this case, it seems these visual experts had never heard of the telephoto lens.

(...If Boehlert leaves you wanting more, you can also read deadparrot.net's analysis in which Powerline's questions are addressed.)

(image: AP stringer, December 19, 2004.  via pulitzer.org.)

Where There's Smoke, There's ... Smoke?

The shot above is Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj's original photo of an Israeli air strike, taken two days ago.  The one below is the photoshopped version that got him canned yesterday.  By almost all accounts, Mr. Hajj was caught trying -- in the most amateur sort of way -- to enhance the smoke in his original picture.

If you follow the links on this story, you'll see an absolute flood of coverage in the right wing blogosphere.  Using Rathergate as its claim to fame, the mob -- led by littlegreenfootballs -- is assuming that Hajj not only doctored other pics, but possibly also colluded in turning the Qana aftermath into a propaganda show.  (If you're not familiar with this thesis, Richard North's so-called "investigation" is the post at the center of the Qana conspiracy theory.)

In speculating why Hajj did this, however, the right is actually doing an admirable job confusing the situation with their own propaganda.  A much more interesting source of inquiry, I would offer, comes from a  discussion among a group of professional photographers that was in full swing on Sportshooter just as the story broke.

Tuesday Bulletin Board: "America♥Lebanon"

If Sunday's NYT Week In Review thought America's Middle East policy lacked a compass, they should have waited till Monday to see our stance on Lebanon do a 180˚.

If your going to conduct foreign policy by photo op, and you want to leave the impression you suddenly gives a damn about the locals, should a handshake with the President really be that big a stretch?  And, unless absolutely unavoidable, why make the other guy do all the straining (unless, your real intent is to reach out while putting the guy in his place).

The Wingnut Mannequins

Maybe the culture war's "battle of the week" was slated for Washington, but it seems Boston saw a lot more of a showdown.

The AP reported Wednesday (via Huffington Post) that an anti-gay rights group in Boston had intimidated Macy's into removing two store-window mannequins honoring the 2006 Boston Pride event.  Given that Bush and Frist arranged a (failed) Senate vote on an anti-gay marriage amendment this week, this story couldn't be more timely.  As well, the visuals (and the attendant mindset) are just too fascinating not to offer to The BAG community for deconstruction (and also, a little blow back).

What I've done is borrow the photos from the Mass Resistance website, and then reproduce their captions (poor grammar, and all) onto the sticky notes.