AJ Strata noticed an awful lot of suspiciously-dramatic juxtapositions in foreign stringer photographs, like the wedding dress amidst the rubble of a building.

Confederate Yankee then noticed a trend towards displaying children's tricycles amidst the rubble, in a piece he called, ahem, "The Schwinns of War."

Now Slublog notices a new trend in Lebanese war "journalism."

You tell me -- how is it all these Mickey Mouse dolls and stuffed animals just happen to be thrown clear of all covering rubble, and appear so darned clean and soot-free?

He calls his piece The Passion of the Toys.

It's a must read. Or, well, a must-look-at, since it's almost all photos. You don't need much editorializing. How did that very-clean lion stuffed animal, for example, just happen to land sitting on its belly, its forepaws neatly lying over each other?

Is anybody buying this picture? Well, apart from Reuters or whoever.

This picture is about real-looking as the Gelflings in The Dark Crystal.

Don't believe me? Compare for yourself:

The next thing you know we'll be seeing Muppets lying dead amidst the wreckage, pools of hot blood darkening around their felt heads.

A point I tried to make but didn't-- if the MSM had to hire Israelis to collect their photographs from Israel (which they don't; by and large they simply ignore Israeli deaths and carnage altogether), would they let such suspiciously-propagandistic pictures go from their desk to the wires without their wondering "Gee, maybe these Israelis have a stake in this war, and are attempting to shade world opinion through 'sweetened' photographs oh-so-poignantly illustrating their plight?"

Were it the Israelis pumping out maudlin, melodramatic pictures like this, I have a feeling Reuters' and the BBC's and the rest's critical faculties would be better engaged, and their skepticism aroused.

But these pics play into the storyline they believe in their own heads -- The Israelis are no better than the terrorists they're attempting to kill, and are guilty of the crime of disproportionate response -- and hence these dubious photos bypass their bullshit-detectors almost entirely.

Like Terry Lane said in defense of himself for printing up Jesse MacBeth's long-discredited tales of his soldiering in Iraq and the atrocities he was ordered to commit: "it seemed plausible because it fit the facts."

Well, these photos "fit the facts."

As Reuters, the BBC, the AFP, the AP, CNN, et al. imagine them to be.

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (58)
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Makes one wonder what other compromises they might make to protect their asses.

Maybe, on occasion, you appease Hezbollah by looking the other way as a laughable forgery gets put out to the world as "photojournalism."

Posted by: Ace at 08:56 AM | Comments (9)
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Bumped. As I sounded like a dork on FoxNews, I thought I'd bump this post, so people might know what the hell I was trying to say.

...

As I've argued, these foreign stringers, with obvious political biases in favor of Hezbollah and their fellow Ismamists, keep coming up with suspiciously dramatic images that of course inflame Muslim passions.

One has to wonder-- how do they keep getting so lucky? I have written before about these suspiciously-dramatic pictures, and the obvious fact that they are being "sweetened," staged, manipulated, dressed like a Hollywood set for maximum propaganda value.

This practice is unethical, this practice is propaganada, and this practice is, in short, a lie.

A.J. Strata rounded up some very suspicious photos a week ago.

Does anyone, for example, believe this maniquin with its wedding dress -- serving as a symbol of hope for the future now obliterated by Israeli bombs -- just happened to be blown out of the bomb-impact zone and land perfectly upon its feet?

That's by Reuters' (duh) Sharif Karim, by the way-- one of the photographers at Qana, which all the MSM organizations stake their reputations on, as it is INCONCEIVABLE that low-paid low-experience foreign stringers would ever juice up a picture for salability or political propaganda value.

Well! I guess a foreign Muslim photographer just got lucky again to find the inciting, dramatic picture of a burning Koran after an Israeli air strike, huh? It's the perfect visual metaphor for the Islamist cause -- the Jews destroying the Koran itself -- and I just suppose he happened to luck upon a bomb site where one was conveniently still aflame. I would imagine a book would either stop burning, or be completely burned (and hence not burning) 99% of the time you visited a scene two hours after an attack, but this phographer just got lucky once again, right?

That photographer's name, by the way? Adnan Hajj of Reuters.

And yet Reuters put both of these photos on their wires. Without asking any questions of these photographers. Without showing the slightest doubt that perhaps the photographers hadn't "helped" these scenes a little a bit to get a picture more useful for Islamist propaganda.

Quoting a prediction I made four days ago, yet again:

Apparently American media organizations aren't particularly interested in how foreign stringers keep getting these poignant constrasts of the innocence of childhood and the grimness of war over and over again.

I guess they're just lucky or something.

The American media is setting itself up for a massive scandal. One day, it will in fact come out that they are guilty of willful blindness and a deliberate avoidance of asking their stringers tough questions to maintain their own plausible deniability.

The media always seems outraged at Bush's "staging" of actual, well, staged political events.

Why are they so uninterested in foreign stringers staging pictures for Hezbollah?

Let me clue the media in on something: The idea that reporters and photographers should be perfectly neutral in a war is somewhat controversial in America. Reporters all seem to believe it, but most of the public actually thinks that Americans should sort of side with Americans.

Why is it that the American and European media assume that Muslims -- some of the most tribally, ethnically loyal people on the face of the earth -- buy into this standard of complete robotic objectivity, when they can't even manage to convince their fellow Americans it's the proper ethics of journalism?

They always lecture us how we should understand more about the Muslim culture. Have any of these morons actually attempted a probing inquiry into whether the culture of these foreign-born Muslim stringers actually accepts the idea of neutrality and objectivity in a war against the infidel Americans and Zionist Jew Pigs?

Or are they just projecting their own Western values on to them, in a bit of racist Orientalism?

Thanks to Dan Riehl, who is going through all of Adnan Hajj's old shots to find further proof of sweetening or outright falsification.

Posted by: Ace at 08:43 AM | Comments (139)
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Confederate Yankee and Strata-Sphere, I swear on my honor I named you as finding the pictures first. The "I noticed" was probably the one of the few times I said "I" did something, rather than "we" or "bloggers" noticed.

I hat-tipped in the interview. But they cut it down to a very boring soundbite that lasted 10 seconds. Probably the only usuable footage because I was looking down and around most of the time.

Ugggchh. I really didn't think about the consequences of this in advance.

What was the question about? Well, the reporter specifically asked me about "umm" and "ahhh" and "errrr." So I was dealing with that subject matter. I was perfectly on point.

No thanks to Allah.

And I should say, emphatically, that I was tipped to this sort of thing by Confederate Yankee, who was in turn alerted to suspiciously-dramatic editorial-column-in-one-burst-of-a-flashbulp pictures by AJ Strata of the Stratasphere.

If I have seen further than others before me, it is only because I stood upon the shoulders of giants, and then shamelessly ripped off their hard work and passed it off as my own.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (52)
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Andy the Squirrel has been worried about my anonymity and fallout from losing it.

His words made my blood chill to icy red:

They got Gannon. They can get anyone.

We live in frightening times.

Fear And Loathing At The Huffington Post: This really goes better with the last post, but there's nothing in this post except a throwaway in-joke about Lord God King Jeff Gannon, so I'll link Gutfeld's evisceration of the Party of Fear here.

And what do they fear?

Fear of free speech when it mocks your beliefs.
Fear of free speech when it speaks back to you.
Fear of free speech when it comes from Christians.
Fear of free speech when it comes from me.
Fear that your definition of free speech - that only you get to be heard-- won't fly with us Wal-mart shoppers.

fear of a police state unless of course it actually is a police state, like, Venezuela

Via BloggerAle, which is a blog about beer. And maybe boobies. But definitely beer.

Ohhhh Lord: Looked like a dork. Sounded like a dork. My soundbite was tedious and said nothing.

Egad.

Who's Jeff Gannon? Oh, no one much. Just the most completely totally awesome guy ever, that's all.

Thanks to Dave S.

Posted by: Ace at 07:28 AM | Comments (47)
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Sorry for the second Drudge link in a row, but this is pretty damned interesting.

Liberal McCarthyism

Bigotry and hate aren't just for right-wingers anymore.

BY LANNY J. DAVIS
Tuesday, August 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

WASHINGTON--My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.

This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing....

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman:

• "Ned Lamont and his supporters need to [g]et real busy. Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an AMerican who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby" (by "rim," posted on Huffington Post, July 6, 2006).

• "Joe's on the Senate floor now and he's growing a beard. He has about a weeks growth on his face. . . . I hope he dyes his beard Blood red. It would be so appropriate" (by "ctkeith," posted on Daily Kos, July 11 and 12, 2005).

• On "Lieberman vs. Murtha": "as everybody knows, jews ONLY care about the welfare of other jews; thanks ever so much for reminding everyone of this most salient fact, so that we might better ignore all that jewish propaganda [by Lieberman] about participating in the civil rights movement of the 60s and so on" (by "tomjones," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).

• "Good men, Daniel Webster and Faust would attest, sell their souls to the Devil. Is selling your soul to a god any worse? Leiberman cannot escape the religious bond he represents. Hell, his wife's name is Haggadah or Muffeletta or Diaspora or something you eat at Passover" (by "gerrylong," posted on the Huffington Post, July 8, 2006).

...

And these are some of the nicer examples.

One Sunday morning on C-Span I debated Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel on the Lieberman versus Lamont race. Afterwards I received a series of emails--many of them in ALL CAPS (which often suggests the hyper-frenetic state of these extremist haters)--that were of the same stripe as the blog posts, and filled with the same level of personal hate.

Welcome to the party, Pal. And I don't mean that in a nasty way. I just mean, well, yeah, you are finally getting a taste of what so many others have been seeing and documenting for so long.

The left now routinely engages in the sort of Jew-baiting that even Pat Buchanan would find repulsive.

The hatred is born out of a sense of powerlessness and futility. And the incoherent, foam-flecked rage is designed, yes, to "chill the right to dissent" of anyone who fails to match their level of ideological purity and partisan fury.

Is there a similar impulse on the right? It hardly seems so to me. I'm a blue state conservative, less concerned with social issues than many of my readers, and leaning more to the center or left than them to the extent I do care, and while we have sometimes sharp disagreements, none of social conservatives here have ever sought to mau-mau me. The worst epithet hurled at me came from Bart, who called me "a libertarian."

Hey, I don't like being called a dirty filthy pot-smoking wife-swapping bi-curious hippy libertarian, but that's pretty weak beer compared to the venomous smears calculated to cow everyone into lockstep compliance with the Kos agenda.

The Democrats have been groping in futility for an answer to their problem -- the essential unpopularity of liberalism -- that they've finally decided to Give Peaceniks A Chance. It's an interesting experiment, I guess, and I'm curious to see how it works out. I could see it being anything from a fiasco to a moderate "people powered" success.

I guess their own brain-trust had proven time and time again to be inadequate to the task at hand; it's not then totally insane to take a chance on Kos. He couldn't do any worse than Bob Shrum.

Except, you know, he actually could do worse than Bob Shrum. Kos could, possibly, lose not only the coming elections, but the next three or four. Which is something Bob Shrum, for all his brilliance at repeated electoral failure, could never manage himself.

Politics always evolve. But the left seems to have metastisized into a creepy hybrid of identity politics and not-so-covert antisemitism, antiamericanism and transnational anarchism, pacificism abroad and rumors of war at home, and an otherwise unprincipled, endlessly malleable non-ideology consisting of little else than "we must take power."

It's partisan fury in search of a program.

Will this work? I sure hope not, and not simply because it may presage bad things for the Republican Party; it might also herald a very ugly chapter for American politics and culture generally.

Posted by: Ace at 07:05 AM | Comments (29)
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An odd place for an important battle in the War on Terror.

Who knew we'd have to win hearts and minds in Hartford?

Jack Ellovich of Hartford voted for Lieberman Tuesday, and predicted that the primary could have national implications.

"If Joe loses today because of the anti-war thing, I think you're also going to see a lot of Republicans running for the door," Ellovich said.

Lamont, a millionaire owner of a cable television company, held a slight lead of 51 percent to 45 percent over Lieberman among likely Democratic voters, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday.

He does not look confident or optimistic to me. He looks resigned to defeat. But then, that might be the story the MSM wants to push.

Update: I've heard a lot about the 29,000 recent voters signing up to vote, as Democrats, I guess. I took this to be unmitigated bad news for Lieberman, assuming almost all of these were "netroots" Kossack voters who haven't voted since they shot Bobby.

But David Gergen on FoxNews just said there was "some indication" these new voters were in fact largely Independents, signing up for the purpose of voting for Lieberman.

I'm not making any predictions. And even Johnny Coldcuts says, "Just leave me out of this one."

Posted by: Ace at 06:46 AM | Comments (13)
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Video Link: If you care. That's Fox's live streaming feed; no idea when I'll be on, if at all.

...

Couldn't sleep last night, even though I took two sleeping pills, which I never do, because it screws me up so much the following day. After laying in bed mind whirring from two to four a.m., I finally put on Anchorman, which usually does the trick. It engages me just enough to keep my mind from whirring, but I've seen it so many times I have little interest in focusing on it; so it basically blocks me from thinking and puts me out like a light. more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:53 AM | Comments (278)
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While alienating centrists:

Centrists and moderates like Joe Lieberman are woefully naive in 2006 America. They expect a seat at the table and to be part of the conversation. Democrats all around America are getting a little tired of getting the door shut in our faces. At least Joe got a kiss before he got screwed. We're still waiting for the kiss.

We don't want Democrats who can break bread with Republicans, we need Democrats who will cut their opponents balls off and serve them back to them on a platter.

Remember that stupid Lamont ad I told you about the other day? There's another one, featuring a loudmouthed guy screaming about high gas prices (and blaming Lieberman for them). The guy is obviously cursing, and car horns and traffic noises are used to 'bleep' the expletives, which include the F-bomb. Repeatedly.
This ad was run on hip-hop stations, for some reason.

A major Hartford talk radio station has picked up on it and played it several times, and asked people to call in about it.
The response was overwhelmingly negative, even from Democrats...and one Jamaican fellow was horrified that people would think this was attractive to the 'hip hop' crowd (Read: actual black people don't wallow in four-letter words except in Spike Lee movies).

And before people point out the bad language frequently employed on this blog, please note: No one here is running for office. This is an entertainment site, and sometimes swearing is funny.
We expect a little more decorum than that from our Senators.

Lamont is being mishandled badly. I feel bad for the guy.

Posted by: LauraW. at 05:23 AM | Comments (26)
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A bit extreme:

...shepherds in the rural western Baghdad neighborhood of Gazalea have recently been murdered, according to locals, for failing to diaper their goats....

...because, as the NPR audio report says, the exposed genitals of goats may cause impure thoughts in locals who come in contact with them.

Two points:

1) This is a religious-fanatic militia thing, not official state policy.

2) At least they're not blaming the victim.

Posted by: Ace at 08:10 PM | Comments (140)
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