Let's accept for a moment that the way television, print and internet reports colour our vision of the world is so complete and totalizing, we may have no chance to view the world outside of it. Let's assume and accept this. Given that, you would assume that the people and groups who wield the most power would be the most deft at producing media images. It just makes sense. How else would it work?

We just don't live in that world. We live in a world where one of the two most powerful political parties on the face of the planet has no idea of what the fuck it is doing. We live in a world where the Republican Party, at the crescendo of its quadrennial quest for power, could not even be bothered to make a series of backdrop images for their Presidential nominee to speak in front of. Apart from being poorly chosen in every regard, the below image is the contemporary political allegory par excellence.



Ladies and Gentlemen, we are truly fucked. While talking about veteran's rights and the call to service, John McCain spoke in front of an image of the Walter Reed Middle School. Only two options are available to us; that the Republican media machine just thought the picture looked good, or that they set about searching for Walter Reed's other namesake building, the veteran's hospital, and fucked up. I'll let you decide for yourselves which version of events is more terrifying.


To clarify, this is the Middle School:



This is the Medical Center:



There is no feasible way that McCain's mediajugend actually meant to use the school, becuase as we all know, the McCain/Palin ticket seeks to partially privitize schools like Walter Reed Middle School and support home schooling - and McCain even called the very school district the school is in 'enourmously wasteful' in 2006. What's clear is that the real Walter Reed has too many columns - which the GOP had been using to attack Obama with all week - and some titburger thought that he'd substitute in the next best thing. Now, Obama's columns were fucking atrocious by any measure, where ancient architecture comes to signify the right to power, you're in trouble. The GOP even has a new ad, called 'Temple', another in their long list of ineffective poorly-thought out jabs at Obama being a celebrity. This, however, is far more terrifying, merely galling. What preceded this particular bout of insanity makes it erotically galling. The lefty blogs, usually a vomit-stained arsehole of iniquity, have come through with some comedy by pointing out that at several points in the video used to introduce McCain to the floor of the GOP, stock photography was used whenever black people were required to show the diverse base of the GOP.

Compare the video here at timecodes 6:45 and 7:02 with the following:




The Republican Party: we seriously have no idea where to find black people. It would be more expensive and time consuming to source these images from iStockPhoto.com than for some fucker to nip out to the park with a campaign worker (who happens to be black) and take some photos with his iPhone bought with illegal donations from McCain's cheating of the campaign finance laws, which he wrote. But that's another story. What we're looking at is a beautifully laid out, dressed-up, ready-to-party clusterfuck of cosmic proportions. A candidate who only has an image, only has a surface layer to sell, who cannot even dress himself, and now cannot even organize for some generic images to be put behind him. Not even that bullshit.

Ask yourself what's worse - because both are pretty bad:

1) A Democratic Party convention that uses styrofoam columns to give their candidate the air of Presidentiality, largely because his blackness still causes a lot of people to wonder why Lil Jon is wearing a suit.
2) A Republican Party that uses a picture of the wrong building to avoid looking like the other guy's columns, and is so terrified of black people that it has to pay for someone else to take photos of them.

Could it get worse? Well, this is the Republicans we're talking about, so don't set your standards too low.. The 9/11 video used to shore up John McCain's security credentials, sort of glossed over for the moment in all the Sarah Palin hubbub, may be the shit-cherry on the shit-cake. Apart from claiming that the hostage crisis of came out of nowhere, with no reference to that which shattered Iran, the video talks about Arab extremism as a 'uniform' enemy, conflating Al-Qaeda, Iraq and Iran as a sort of swarthy globule of beards and AK-47s. While this is largely hilarious, it doesn't sit well with plans the Republicans may have to actually stop any of the three sub-genera of sweaty foreigners blowing things up. Well, at least Rudy was able to rub one out into a sock - that pays him back for his heroism and bravery in doing what he did on that fateful day, 9/11, a day that will live on in infamy, 9/11. The mix of bullshit in the video actually makes the kinds of errors it didn't need to - where the truth would have made a stronger case for experienced national security. Who better than Skeletor to deal with nuanced threats? Someone who knows his way around the tribes of the desert, surely. If they are uniform, then it follows that mere strength can beat them. How's that working out, by the way? Because as one of the attendees of the conference said:

This isn't good. I wanted excellent political advertising this year. Clearly we're fucked this time around. How long has it been since 'Daisy'? Are we actually going backward? At least the Swiftboat ads gave me an erection; they were just flat-out bullshit. They didn't have mistakes. McCain's ads help Obama by casting him as the shallow celebrity, when that's all people have voted for in the past 20 years. Obama's ads have too much policy and detail to be really interesting. I'm going to start a 527 group of my own; United Peoples For Better Bullshit. We won't claim that McCain's adopted daughter is black - we'll claim he's black. We won't claim Obama is a shallow liberal - we'll claim he doesn't exist at all. Is the old pigfucking too much to ask for?

Get your fucking act together, people.