Vote Republican or go to Hell.

I love these graphical musical depictions.

Many more where that came from.

Via Jaltcoh, who's finding fault with an article about "the neuroscience of music."

"It's just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title."

David Zucker — direct of "Airplane!" — directs a little campaign ad called Call Me Senator":

A long way from San Francisco/Nancy Pelosi.

A Democratic candidate's anti-hippie/anti-Pelosi ad:



Ha. I hadn't seen scary hippies — outside of Halloween — in quite some time.

After all of this politics...

... don't you feel you need a bath?

UPDATE: I'm back. Not from a bath. From a long bike ride. Over 20 miles. Glad to see the Badgers crushed Minnesota.

Hunter was hired to make videos of Edwards, "but this one is said to have shown him taking positions that weren’t on his official platform."

The Daily News gossip column quipped about the report that there's a John Edwards/Rielle Hunter sex tape.

This sets Popehat off, riffing wildly on sexual wordplay, for example, here:

This brings us, of course, to pirates. How did it come to pass that “to take one’s foot” became an idiom for orgasm? Prior to the Revolution, and therefore prior to the metric system, the French used measurements akin to the imperial system. When corsairs went to divide their spoils after a stint of rapine, each would naturally demand his portion of the whole. The allotted part, by convention, was a foot-high mound of booty. No, really.

Taking his foot of gold was the pirate’s pleasure. Since not everything that happens in Tortuga stays in Tortuga, taking the foot gradually became anyone’s pleasure in anything... And just as a noble, sexy, piraty bit of bawd has by now been stripped bare by its broad overuse in French, so too has the vitality of allusiveness in English suffered under the weight of too popular a press. We’ve seen enough; it’s time to close your eyes and think of English.

Maybe you'd better go over there and see how this all fits together.

Clay Shirky says "Dear Mr. Obama" was the most "affecting" video of the campaign.

Per Shirky:

I am an anti-Iraq-war Democrat, and it nevertheless brought tears to my eyes (and I don't cry easy -- will.i.am's Yes We Can left me fairly cold.)...

This is a video made by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Stuff like the American flag draped just in frame looks hokey to the godless/ sodomite/ baby-killing wing of the Democratic party (my people), but is part of a "plain speaking and right thinking" package that clearly hit just right with the target audience. It was seen 13 million times in 3 months, which topped Obama Girl in absolute views, and I've got a Crush...on Obama was up a year and a half.

This is why this video is really really important: the simple message and Blair Witch production values (good enough to be effective, bad enough to seem unplanned) made this video like Democratic kryptonite. The video was largely circulated via homophilous forwarding along conservative channels.

By the way, it was "homophilously" forwarded to me many times, and, though I posted many videos, from different sides, I chose not to post that one. Shirky notes that few of his students (in NYU media studies) had seen that video, and, basically, it wasn't meant for them. It was the perfect viral video:

For the base, a muscular but polite attack on the very issue that brought Obama into the spotlight. For the undecided, the emotional charge is much likelier to sway them than argumentation. And for the Dems -- nothing. The video might as well not have existed for all it was seen in Democratic circles. Since the video's sole speaker can't be criticized without making the criticizer look churlish at best, almost no Dems forwarded it, linked to it, talked about it.

That is, it couldn't be used in a negative way by McCain's opponents, so it didn't backfire, as many videos do: "Dear Mr. Obama was music to Republican ears while being inert in Democratic hands." Bottom line: "expect it to be a template for 2010."

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said...

I had never seen this video before. I must be odd. While I agree with the guy, I don't find the video affecting. Or maybe I'm not odd and Shirky is wrong.

Interesting. Me too: I agreed with the man in the video, but he didn't play my heartstrings. He was stating the obvious as far as I was concerned, and the revelation of the prosthetic leg did not change anything for me. Whether he had lost a limb or not, I know plenty of others have. There is no new information or argument, just an emotional appeal that works if you've somehow failed to know the most basic things about the war.

So then, perhaps the interesting question is: Why did Shirky cry? The video was, in his view, "inert" for people like him. I think he means only that war opponents felt like suppressing it because they perceived it as having the power to generate support for the war. But he may be quite wrong about that, since he is imagining the effect on people who don't think the way he does. And it may be that war opponents tend to be people who react very strongly to the sight of physical injuries -- to the point where emotion gets the better of reason. In that case, the video is not inert, and it could be used for the anti-war cause, the way any war injury and death is used.

Why don't I post more Obama ads?

I love to post and discuss interesting political ads, but I end up posting mostly McCain ads. One reason is that the McCain campaign has done some pretty amusing, outside-the-box ads. But another reason is that I have a hard time finding the Obama ads. If there's a page somewhere with the ads, I can't find it. If there isn't, is this because ads are crafted for particular localities (or demographic groups) and the campaign is not eager to make them available to the general public?

The official McCain page in YouTube has his ads, and you can check out the newest ones whenever you want. But the official Obama page in YouTube seems to only have video of (pretty boring) campaign events. No ads. I can never find anything to use.

Anyway, I went looking for the Obama ads this morning and, while I couldn't find a page of new things, I did run across the famous 1984 ad (unofficial) from March 2007. It was interesting to watch it again, to watch it knowing that Hillary Clinton had been defeated:



When Hillary was so formidable, that seemed really cool. This morning, to me, it seems awful to throw a hammer into her face and blow it up.

"American Prayer" of the damned.

I was just complaining about some annoying web video with low production values, but right after I posted that, I watched this new Obama-promoting video, which has the glossiest production values, and I found it impossible to watch... and I knew I wanted to blog about it so I kept forcing myself, but I had to click stop after a minute and a half:



What made it so insufferable? I admit that I came to it from the Corner, which primed me with the line "Personality on steroids: Obama as the coming, secular Messiah," but I don't think it was that.

It was the the insane discontinuity between the sad-sack dreariness of the photographs and those Hollywood celebrities who were made to look as though they belonged in settings of economic despair. They were photographed in black and white. They made sad faces. There's the normally smarmy Jason Alexander, pressing his hands together in mournful prayer. Jason Alexander! Do you think we will take you seriously because you have that serioso look on your face? The repetition of the word "prayer," with one praying celebrity after another, when you know you're going to be told that the answer to their prayers is Obama.... horrible.

And that miserable song. That vehicle for Hollywood celebrities to express their mourning, depressing, hopeful quasi-religiosity. Am I supposed to know it? I Google and find it described in Wired as "Dave Stewart's 'American Prayer,' featuring the former Eurythmic trying to come off like some sort of cut-rate Bono, as he strums a guitar that's not even audible in the song."

Adding to the video's cringe-worthy nature are celebrity appearances by Forrest Whittaker, Barry Manilow, Jason Alexander, Whoopi Goldberg and others, who join forces with on overwhelming level of "We Are The World"-type smugness.

Certain shots are so deeply embarrassing that we had to hit pause a few times just to make it all the way through. Watch at your own risk, and don't say we didn't warn you.

There's a vote over there to ascertain whether it's "the worst Obama song yet?" and it's winning, though not by all that much, which makes you wonder what cringe-inducing, celebrity-infested swill the "no" voters have in mind.

"We Are The World." We had evolved to the point where we all laughed at it, and now, have we suddenly slipped back into that 80s subordination of art to sanctimony? Then, it was for the sake of feeding starving children. Now, that aesthetic has returned in service of a politician. Yet, surely, it's true that we will look back on this election kitsch and laugh. Soon. Like right now.

ADDED: I'm watching this to the end now, and I'm just shaking my head at how counterproductive this is for Obama. These celebrities are so wrapped up in what they appear to perceive as the poignant beauty of their emotions that they don't see that they are beating us over the head with the idea that America is a terrible place. That is: This video is anti-American. That is not the message Obama wants right now!

Also, at 1:35, you can see the display of crosses that I happen to know is on the beach in Santa Monica. I was just there and took this photograph from the amusement pier:



I made it to the end. This video isn't merely terrible. It's a testament to tone-deafness. It resonates in all the wrong ways with the Obama campaign, amplifying the very things that Obama is trying to mute.

Paris Hilton does a pro-McCain ad!

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Oh? You think it's not pro-McCain? Explain why!

(And I'll tell you why you're wrong.)

ADDED, 12 hours later: I guess I owe you an explanation. My reason for calling this a pro-McCain ad is this. First, of course, Paris Hilton is promoting herself, as she always does. She exploited the opportunity that the McCain ad gave her, as she exploits every opportunity. That's very free-market capitalistic of her, but that's not my big reason. McCain's ad presented her as an airhead (for the purpose of suggesting that Obama is also an airhead), so here she is suddenly being very smart. Her ad has her saying something that we are supposed to accept as exactly what a very smart person would say if they weren't limited by constraints of party politics. She presents her answer on oil as a "hybrid" of the 2 candidates' positions, but listen to it! It's McCain's position. She supports off-shore drilling, with appropriate environmental safeguards, as we encourage the development of alternative energy sources.

That's McCain's position! Secret message of the ad: The smart position is McCain's position and not Obama's.

Now, you might want to say that all that funny stuff at the beginning about McCain's age is anti-McCain. No, it's not! It's McCain's position. McCain is constantly making jokes about how old he is. How many times has he said "I'm older than dirt and more scarred than Frankenstein"?

Finally, Hilton is giving the "biggest celebrity" ad another big boost. That ad has already worked, but it was coming to the end of it's life cycle. Hilton jolted it back alive.



FROM THE COMMENTS (that predate my explanation): Ben (The Tiger) said:

How is it pro-McCain?

1. Well... there's no hint of pulling back from her lifestyle. Looking to where she can fly next is not unlike McCain's call for the sound of fifty thousand Harleys.

2. Her position is very much like McCain's -- drill, but not everywhere. (I'd prefer more drilling.)

3. If she really wanted to skewer McCain, she'd do more than make fun of his age in a way that he did himself on SNL.

4. Obama not seriously engaged.

5. Again, she's not backing down from the American life of excess. There will be no scolding of people's life choices. That doesn't fit with the environmentalist movement.

6. She left the door totally open for the McCain riposte -- "Paris Hilton supports drilling! Paris Hilton has a better energy policy than Barack Obama!"

***

So the ad's objectively pro-McCain.

Was it intentionally pro-McCain?

I suspect so -- I don't think she's dumb.

But then, I'm prejudiced -- I'm a McCain fan.

Beldar said:

I don't think the ad's intentions, other than furthering the popularity ambitions of Ms. Hilton, are at all clear.

Because I already had a view of Obama as (mostly) humorless and of McCain as being willing to poke fun at himself ("older than dirt"), I was inclined to take her comments about the "really old guy" as fond teasing. But honestly, that's me projecting sly wit onto Ms. Hilton that I'm not at all sure she intended.

The ad does McCain palpable damage by its strong suggestion that he opposes conservation. He doesn't. As others have pointed out, what she describes as the "Paris Hilton position" is in fact essentially the McCain position (a combination of prudent development and conservation). In fairness, the McCain campaign itself has muddied these waters by choosing to lampoon Obama for suggesting that people check their tire pressure, which in fact is a perfectly good conservation suggestion, albeit wholly inadequate by itself.

I'm not at all sure why, Prof. A, you think this video cuts so unequivocally in McCain's favor. I think you may be crediting the "average" viewer, or at least large numbers of viewers, with more subtlety and discrimination than they in fact possess, but I eagerly await your promised explanation.

Ben (The Tiger) responds:

I want to see Althouse's explanation, but I think it's telling that almost all the right-wingers whose reactions I've read think that the spot was charming, whatever else they've thought about Paris Hilton in the past. (And I do, too.)

Yeah, and Beldar, the unclarity of Hilton's position is what makes it effective. An openly pro-McCain ad would not be effective. Her above-party-politics pose is .... hot.

Greg Toombs said...

The ad is 90% about McCain (when it's not about Paris) and 10% the 'other guy'/Barack.

Specific McMentions:

1) He's the oldest celebrity in the world
2) like super old
3) dancing a sin & beer in a bucket examples
4) is McCain ready to lead
5) wrinkly, white-haired guy
6) thanks, white-haired dude
7) Paris' energy plan endorses McCain's drilling plus his $300 million battery prize
8) three McCain pictures - none of Barack

It's all about McCain.

When it's not about Paris.

J Lee said:

What makes the ad pro-McCain in large part isn't just what it says, but the McCain camp's reaction to the ad.

Watching how the morning network news shows tried to play it today, the spin was "Paris Hilton strikes back at McCain ad", which is where it would have stayed if they had their way. Unfortunately, they were forced to also cover the McCain camp's reply that credited Ms. Hilton with having a better energy policy than Barack Obama. Had the McCain camp responded with the same sort of humorless "whatever" remark the Obama people did, it would have freed up the big media folks to paint this exclusively as a slap-down of Maverick and his original ad.

Now, here's something different, and very smart, from LB-Philadelphia PA (who has only commented once before, back last year):

Has anyone else picked up on the subliminal racism of the "best tan" comment? I mean, Obama is seriously tanned and he's from Hawaii. It's code, I tell you, code!

Interesting, but is that pro- or anti-Obama point?

"Why are the letters 'NIG' on the child's pajamas?"

Asks a commenter — "Tom" — on my post about the new Hillary Clinton commercial, the one that shows several children sleeping and then Clinton taking a national security phone call in the middle of the night. You can see the commercial at the link, and the pajamas in question are on display during seconds 11 and 12. On pausing, staring, and thinking, I believe these are pajamas that say "good night" all over them, but the letters "NIG" are set apart by a fold in the fabric.





Is the campaign responsible for sending out a subliminal message to stimulate racist thoughts in the unsuspecting viewer? It is either deliberate or terribly incompetent. There is no other writing on screen until the very end of the commercial, and if letters appear in any place in a commercial, they should be carefully selected letters. Certainly, each image is artfully composed and shot and intended to deliver an emotional impact. Could this be a mere lapse?

In 2000, there was a much-discussed commercial for George W. Bush that displayed the letters "RATS":

The announcer starts by lauding George W. Bush's proposal for dealing with prescription drugs, and criticizes the plan being offered by Vice President Al Gore. Fragments of the phrase ''bureaucrats decide'' -- deriding Mr. Gore's proposal -- then dance around the screen.

Then, if the viewer watches very closely, something else happens. The word ''rats,'' a fragment of the word ''bureaucrats,'' pops up in one frame. And though the image lasts only one-thirtieth of a second, it is in huge white capital letters, larger than any other word on the commercial.

The advertisement then declares, ''The Gore prescription plan: bureaucrats decide.''

But as one might be expect in a tightly contested presidential race, the Democrats have given the 30-second advertisement more than a quick glance.

After being alerted by an eagle-eyed Democrat in Seattle, aides to Mr. Gore examined the advertisement frame by frame, spotted the suspicious word and gave a copy of a slowed-down version to The New York Times.

Those aides said they had no comment and preferred that the advertisement, which has appeared in 33 markets nationwide since August, speak for itself.

Alex Castellanos, who produced the commercial for the Republican National Committee, insisted that the use of the word was ''purely accidental,'' saying, ''We don't play ball that way. I'm not that clever.''

Asked when he had first noticed the word in the commercial, Mr. Castellanos said, ''That's all I want to say.''

But several Republican and Democratic advertising consultants who were told of the commercial, as well as many independent academics, said they were startled that such a word would appear and said it appeared to be a subliminal attempt to discredit Mr. Gore.

Mr. Bush's chief media consultant, Mark McKinnon, said he had not noticed the word ''rats'' when he reviewed the advertisement before it was broadcast. Most people probably have not noticed either, although some people who watched a tape of the commercial at normal speed today -- albeit very carefully -- said it was visible.

After being told of the word, Mr. McKinnon said the commercial should be corrected because it ''certainly might give reporters or anybody else who looked at it'' a reason to stir up attention.

But after taking another look at the advertisement, he amended his comment.

'' 'Rats' is not a message,'' Mr. McKinnon said. '' 'Bad plan' or 'seniors lose' might be. But 'rats?' We're just not that clever. I just watched it five times in a row. Hard as I looked, couldn't see 'rats.' ''

Almost every advertising professional interviewed said that given the technology by which commercials are assembled frame by frame, it was virtually impossible for a producer not to know the word was there.

''There is no way that anything Alex Castellanos does is an accident,'' said Greg Stevens, a veteran Republican advertising consultant here.

The intense scrutiny of the "RATS" ad heightens the assumption that presidential candidates these days pay close attention to any incidental lettering that appears in their ads. "RATS" as part of the word "bureaucrats" in an ad criticizing Gore's prescription plan is nothing compared to "NIG" isolated on a sleeping child's shoulder in an ad intended to create doubts about a black man's ability to take an urgent phone call at 3 a.m., an ad authorized by a candidate who has already heard accusations that her campaign is slipping racial material into its attacks on her opponent.

This is either a revolting outrage or shocking incompetence.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some controversy, of course. I know this is hard to take. But let me front page this one, from Mortimer Brezny, who is responding to a commenter who said: "[F]or subliminal messaging to be effective, I think it has to be intelligible. In this case, you really have to fill in the dots (reconstruct the right-half of the G) to make it so. If it had said NIC, would there be an issue, because you could imagine C => G?"

Oh, that is incorrect. The way the mind makes closure is by filling in the blanks. You don't need to see an entire face to envision what the other half of it looks like. That is not a conscious activity of the brain, it is neurological, like seeing the color red.

Certainly, Ann is correct that you activate associational networks in the brain. NIG is quite obviously in the same area of the brain as NIGGER, just as both words are nearby in the dictionary. And the commercial is about Obama. Associating those two neural pathways (Obama, Nig__) at the same time may create the subliminal message Ann is talking about. In that case the real fear being exploited here is "Do you really want a nigger in the White House?"

This is not bunk. Drew Westen has done a good amount of empirical work on it. And political hacks use such research in crafting their ads.

You may disagree with Ann's conclusion. But her analysis explains why the commercial -- incoherently -- focuses on kids in bed. No one is scared that terrorists will break into their home late at night and harm their children. The threat depicted does not correspond to the threat described by the narrator. But the threat depicted does prey on fears of criminals breaking into your home. And it is a persistent stereotype that black people are the source of crime. Indeed, being tough on crime has been a GOP code word for being tough on blacks. Longtime Republican strategist Lee Atwater himself admitted that.

"So if, with our subconscious, we actually notice these 2.5 letters, and our subconscious assumes that this is a G and not a C, then this forms a fragment of a racial slur, which some of us might subconsciously pick up on, and associate, naturally, with Obama."

Yes. The mind does this everyday, as when you see a sign behind Obama's head that reads "CHANG". You don't think Obama has chosen a Chinese running mate. You think Obama's head is obscuring the E because you have seen a "CHANGE" sign before. It does not require conscious thought and it takes less than a second to process.

It's funny that Ann often dithers around for fun to mass appeal, but when she writes a post that clearly demonstrates she's a genius, the claws come out.

Feel free to observe the claws out on many other websites, where personal attacks on me take the place of any serious effort to engage on the merits. For example, the usually serious blogger Kevin Drum calls me harebrained and a glue sniffer. The vicious attack on the messenger bespeaks fear of the message and lack of a substantive argument against it.

NOTE: I've added a link to the video in the first paragraph of the post and two screen captures from the video, taken at 0:11. The first capture is the full screen, with no digital editing. The second capture is a closeup of the lettering, and I've turned up the contrast, saturation, and sharpness. There's no question that there are letters on the pajamas. The letters N and I are very clear. The third letter, G, appears only partially, but it is definitely a G. You can see the center line slightly, and the other letters in the area make it likely that the words "good night" appear as a pattern on the pajamas.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: Pastafarian wrote:

You must be kidding, right? The G is partially obscured, on the side of the screen and slightly out of focus, written sideways, and present for a second or so; I wouldn't even have guessed that it was a G, had I not been told. I would have assumed a C, had I even noticed this.

Amba aptly responds:

That's exactly how a subliminal-advertising genius would do it. With deniability, with doubt, right on the edge of intelligibility. If it was even a little more obvious, it wouldn't work. This way, anyone who brings it up can be called paranoid and crazy; it can be reflected back on the hypersensitive Obama campaign. We'll never know for sure if it's real, but one way to check would be to find out who made the ad and check out some of that person's other work.

By the way, the sleeping child appears to be black. Mere coincidence?

MORE: In this new post.

AND: If you've mocked me for this post, read this and then send me your apology.

Homophobic anti-Giuliani ad.

Who is behind this?

Fox News article:

Zeroing in on concerns among some groups of gay voters, a YouTube.com video directed by a New York writer, theater director and part-time political activist takes aim at Rudy Giuliani and raises questions over the former mayor's support for gay Americans....

The purpose, says Ryan Davis, the director, is to point out what he calls the disconnect between what Giuliani has stood for in the past and what he is saying on the campaign trail. Davis, a gay Democrat, never has supported or worked for Giuliani (he worked for Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2004), but he said at least he used to respect Giuliani's positions.

Giuliani was "over-the-top in support of gay rights, and then pulled back," Davis said.

What crap! Davis is a Democrat, interested in destroying Giuliani and showing his contempt for Republicans by revealing a despicable belief that they hate gay people and that their hatred can be stoked by images of actors behaving according to gay stereotypes. Decent Democrats should condemn Davis's video campaign, "Gays for Giuliani." It's blatantly homophobic. And I condemn Fox News as well, for reporting the story the way it did, illustrating it with a stock photograph of Giuliani in drag that lacks any sufficient connection to belong in a professional journalistic report on the video campaign.

Republicans should resist being baited by this sort of trash and should take note that Democrats are afraid of their front-runner -- afraid enough to deal in stereotypes that offend their values. Or are you going to tell me that Davis is an independent operative, doing his own thing? Then condemn him!

AND: Some people are saying they don't see how the ad is homophobic. Please. Picture an ad about Barack Obama with black actors behaving in an equivalent exaggerated racial style and going on about how much they love him for providing them with some benefit. It would obviously be racist.

The "Obama Girl" guy.

He's Ben Relles, from Madison.

Relles, who was born in Madison, grew up in Philadelphia and got an undergrad degree from UW-Madison in 1997, said what most people want to know first is whether the Obama campaign has anything to do with the videos (it doesn't). Relles is related to one of the founders of the famed early 1970s Madison comedy troupe Kentucky Fried Theatre and traces his own comic instincts to his time at UW-Madison. "Humor is a huge part of the culture on campus," he said....

He says the ultimate goal is simple: He wants barelypolitical.com to be the Web site people turn to first for political humor. If that involves models and pillow fights and fame and fortune, well, old school or new school, somebody has to do it.

Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring.

Let's talk about the onion-ring shaped vortex I started yesterday. All I did was a little casual Freudian interpretation of a Hillary Clinton campaign video. It was a short film, premised on the much-interpreted final scene of "The Sopranos," with Bill and Hillary Clinton seated at a table in a diner, sitting in for Tony and Carmela Soprano. Acting!

Maybe you just sit there pleasantly and think: Isn't it clever for Hillary to use the "Sopranos" scene as a device for informing us about her new campaign song and to include some cute business where she alludes to her concern about health care by having a nice bowl of carrots instead of the onion rings they had on "The Sopranos"? If so, aren't you the good little voter, accepting the message Senator Clinton hoped to insert in your receptacle of a brain? The famously controlled former First Lady is pleased there are people like you.

Me, I'm not so obedient. Even though I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and may very well vote for Hillary, I don't accept these things at face value. What's more I love a ripe opportunity for interpretation, including comic interpretation with sexual, Freudian content. What are you going to say: "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"? You simply cannot say that when Bill Clinton is in the picture. In the whole history of the world, if there is one person for whom a cigar was not just a cigar, it's Bill Clinton.

So here's the passage -- ooh, a passage! -- that got people so excited:

Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.

See that phrase "I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion"? That's an awfully cheap trick, a way to prod bloggers to write about the post. But nobody with any decent readership is dumb enough to say Althouse is crazy to think everyone will agree with that. Right?

I'm saying outright: Come on, everybody, into the vortex. And in they hop. It's an anti-Althousiana fest. I love it!

According to Memeorandum, my onion-rings-are-vagina-symbols story ranks second only to Mayor Bloomberg's leaving the Republican Party. (I'll try to do a free-form Freudian riff on Bloomberg later, perhaps: The O in GOP traumatized him. Ever notice that GOP could be pronounced "go pee"? (I doubt if any blogger who reads that can continue to view me as a "wingnut."))

So let's survey the onion-ring subgenre of anti-Althousiana:

First, let's see what TRex has to say. Surely, a guy who named himself after the biggest, most ferocious dinosaur will have a useful perspective on sexual imagery in film. He begins with the least creative approach found in the anti-Althousianan literature: assertions that Professor Althouse is crazy. I think the poor man knows this is a cliché, because he desperately grasps for colorful ways to say it. He comes up with "a few balloon animals shy of a birthday party" and "on the short bus to Woof-Woof Land." This is mainly padding though. Let's get to the specifics. He quotes me, then says:

Uhhhhhh, hold up, wait a minute. This blogger strongly disagrees and I’m sure if you gave me a couple minutes, I could run out in the yard and round up a couple dozen more, at least.

Ah, ha ha ha ha ha! Good lord, is it really this easy? Now, I'm laughing, but starting to feel a little sad. I don't think TRex is the dumbest guy in the world, yet he wrote something that I had assumed no one was dumb enough to say.

His post is padded with comments from my blog, but his main substance is this:

Apparently in the Mind of Ann Althouse absolutely anything (even something as innocuous as a humble onion ring) gets larded down with layers of psycho-sexual significance when it’s submerged in the warm, sticky tide of sexual charisma that surrounds our former president like a fog.

No, when I saw the onion rings in the final scene of "The Sopranos," I, like many other people, thought they represented communion wafers. The context counts. Here the context was Bill Clinton and the wife he has notoriously cheated on for years. He's saying he wants onion rings, and she's imposing carrots on him. That cries out for psycho-sexual interpretation. It's not the intent of the film's auteur -- unless he's a traitor to Clinton -- but it's imagery that they should have noticed as they were writing the script. TRex seems to want to let them off the hook by acting like associating Bill Clinton with sex is a weird little problem of mine. I don't think so!

Hillary wants to take advantage of Bill in her campaign. Fine. I understand the motivation. But she's got to figure out how to overcome the negatives. Whenever we see them together, we think about their relationship and what he did to it. There is complexity there. She can't expect us to just put that aside. She may be able to compartmentalize as she pursues her goal, but why would we?

TRex brings up last year's biggest anti-Althousiana topic: my interpretion of a photograph of Bill Clinton with a group of bloggers who'd just had lunch with him. That lunch was, ostensibly, an effort to help the Hillary Clinton campaign by using Bill's clout to influence bloggers to think well of her. In the photograph, the woman posed in front of Bill had the effect -- I argued -- of reminding us of Monica Lewinsky. This illustrated the problem of Hillary attempting to use Bill in the campaign.

Here's what TRex says about that now:

Looks like we now have conclusive proof that the whole Unpleasantness from last fall was just a spasm of Althouse’s mania to compulsively eroticize anything and anyone (apparently up to and including innocent foodstuffs) that is unlucky enough to be photographed with Big Dog. I wonder if [the woman in the photograph] realizes now that she could have been wearing a blouse made of prepared vegetables and the reaction would have been exactly the same.

Of course, a "blouse made of prepared vegetables" (why "prepared"?) would have been outrageously suggestive. But what the hell? TRex is intent on denying that Bill Clinton's reputation has a big sexual dent in it. And, by the way, vegetables are not that innocent. Don't you know that they dream of responding to you? Why else are they covered with dew?

Second, let's look at Glenn Kenny, who's the Premiere film critic I got into a bit of a dispute with last week. He makes a show of refraining from attacking me and noting that he gets the song reference, then taking up the idea that it was elitist to use "The Sopranos," shows us what film references the Clintons might make if they were really elitist. Let's move on.

Third, we have Scott Lemieux, whose is probably the biggest hack in the anti-Althousiana genre. He writes about me frequently, even though he can't think of much beyond the usual clichés about how I'm crazy, stupid, drunk, and so forth. It's sad. This is his new effort:

I really hope that she wasn't kidding with the "no blogger will disagree" bit.

Why does he hope I wasn't kidding? I assume that's a mistake. He seems to be somewhat less dim than TRex, even though his writing is duller. But TRex only seems un-dull because he reaches for those phrases like "short bus to Woof-Woof Land" that are typical of second-rate comic writing. Back to Scott:

A consuming obsession with Bill Clinton's sex life is merely banal among American conservatives, and with Althouse more than well-established in any case, but the assumption that it's universal is special.

Oh, lord, that man is boring! This may be the first time I've ever linked to him, even though he writes about me all the time. Someone in his comments says:

It would seem that you have your own obsession with Ann Althouse. I have visited her blog and don't see the reciprocity. I suspect that you have the perfect relationship; you follow every move she makes and she simply isn't aware or doesn't care.

Yeah, well, poor little Scott -- who's actually a political science professor -- will have to satisfy himself alone again for a good long while, because I really don't care. He's too boring! Or should I say merely banal among anti-Althousian scribblers.

Fourth, Instaputz displays a picture of me and then says sexual things about me. If I were a Yale law student, I'd sue him, and I could even leverage my way into federal court with a copyright claim. (I have a Creative Commons license on my photographs in Flickr, but he omits the required attribution and, in any event, it's obvious that I didn't take this picture so the license isn't mine to give.) By the way a "putz" is a little penis, so he might want to order the fried calamari instead of the onion rings.

Fifth, Roy at Alicublog is in the vortex, even though, as usual, he's got nothing interesting to say. My post made him "think of Matt Taibbi, a progressive who is famously embarrassed by the 'silly' American Left." He goes on:

I say that for all the "guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats" Taibbi notices on the left, I see an equal number, at least, of Althousean clowns on the right, as this blog documents.

Yeesh. He's got that Greenwaldian verbosity. Translation: My post is silly. Too bad that with all those words, he can't come up with a single substantive point. Another inconsequential contribution to anti-Althousiana. How embarrassing for little Roy.

Okay, I'll stop. For now.

ADDED: Okay, there's more now: here. Don't miss the added part at the bottom. Well, let me excerpt it:

I just want to emphasize that I stand by my original sexual interpretation. You've got a married couple talking about two foods, one of which is obviously a hole, and the other of which is so clearly phallic that this Google search gets over 70,000 hits.

The man wants the hole-shaped item, and the woman forbids it. She insists that he confine himself to the phallic item, which has been sliced down to puny, thin stick form. The man looks at it sadly, and the woman tells him it's for his own good. If you don't see sexual imagery there, you exist on a very narrow band of human imagination....

When Clinton sadly bites into the carrot stick of his own castration, it makes a crunch noise -- ouch! -- and it's that noise that causes the ominous looking man at the bar ("Johnny Sack") to turn and look at him. He then walks by and gives him a glare. What does that glare mean in the Clinton video? I think it means: "What kind of man are you?"

The new Hillary Clinton video is a take on the last scene of "The Sopranos."

It's clever, the way the video uses the jukebox business from the last "Sopranos" episode to remind us of Hillary's theme song contest. In case you care, I'll just tell you that the winner is "You and I," sung by Celine Dion, and if for some reason, you actually want to listen to that song, click here.

So what do we think of this video? The NYT political blogger Kate Phillips proclaims it "the best campaign spot we’ve seen this season." I don't think so. It was amusing seeing a cameo from Johnny Sack, but I've got some problems.

1. Not everyone gets HBO, so you've got a cultural reference that's a bit elitist. And some people wait for the DVDs, and they rankle at spoilers. But maybe everyone's supposed to have heard about the ending by now. Still, it might rub you the wrong way, to assume familiarity with "The Sopranos." And lots of Americans don't even approve of watching a show that is permeated with violence, obscene language, graphic sex, and the subjugation of women.

2. Do we really want to think of Bill and Hillary sitting in for Tony and Carmela? Tony is a monstrous criminal and Carmela willfully blinds herself to his horrible flaws so that she can keep living in a highly desirable house. Are these good associations for Hillary?

3. Bill is a much better actor than Hillary, and this heightens the sense that she's a pale substitute for the old President we can no longer have.

4. Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.

ADDED: 5. The scene, as derived from "The Sopranos," is designed to create anxiety that an assassination is about to take place. Having Johnny Sack walk by and glare at her preserves that feeling of threat. It's supposed to work because with "The Sopranos," we were waiting to find out how the series would end, but here we are waiting to learn the outcome of the song contest, but it's pushing the envelope for the campaign to suggest an act of violence toward the candidate.

UPDATE: This post has spawned a whole subgenre of anti-Althousiana. I discuss that here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I have another post on the subject here. Excerpt:

A quirky post about a Clinton campaign video touched off a giant blog swarm and what I think was my highest traffic day ever. Based on an earlier blog swarm last September, I now know that what sets the left blogosphere into intense, concerted action is calling attention to Bill Clinton's old sexual problems. I wonder why....

I just want to emphasize that I stand by my original sexual interpretation. You've got a married couple talking about two foods, one of which is obviously a hole, and the other of which is so clearly phallic that this Google search gets over 70,000 hits.

The man wants the hole-shaped item, and the woman forbids it. She insists that he confine himself to the phallic item, which has been sliced down to puny, thin stick form. The man looks at it sadly, and the woman tells him it's for his own good. If you don't see sexual imagery there, you exist on a very narrow band of human imagination....

When Clinton sadly bites into the carrot stick of his own castration, it makes a crunch noise -- ouch! -- and it's that noise that causes the ominous looking man at the bar ("Johnny Sack") to turn and look at him. He then walks by and gives him a glare. What does that glare mean in the Clinton video? I think it means: "What kind of man are you?"

How the candidates fare in the YouTube marketplace of ideas.

The statistics are right there for everyone to see. We don't care much about the official campaign videos they are dumping over there. We want to see them in their unplanned comic moments.

... Clinton's most watched HillCast, titled "Roadmap Out of Iraq," comes nowhere close in popularity to the video showing her singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" off-key at a rally in Iowa. The HillCast has been viewed more than 15,000 times since it was posted on Feb. 17, the out-of-tune moment nearly 1.1 million times since its posting on Jan. 27.

I'd be worried sick about human nature if it were the other way around.

And what we really love is a guy like James Kotecki:

Several times a week, Kotecki, a self-described "political geek" turned YouTube celebrity, advises presidential candidates on their campaign videos -- from his dorm room at Georgetown University....

Kotecki has one recurring message to the candidates and their expensive media advisers: "The Web isn't TV." As in, Web viewers don't expect to be spoken to, they expect to be spoken with. It's a passive experience vs. an interactive one.

"The Web isn't TV." That's profound -- I mean, with respect to YouTube. YouTube looks like just an easy place to put stuff that would be on TV (if only it were way better or paid for or something). What makes YouTube not TV? The searching and sorting mechanisms, linkability, embeddability, displayed statistics and comments, the ability of viewers to put up response videos, like Kotecki's...

Let's watch some Kotecki:



Actually, Kotecki is a little too scripted and artificial for my taste. But I love the idea of this genre, talking back to the campaign videos. If the candidates do what Kotecki wants and talk back to the talk back, it's going to get mighty talky, and the candidates might get suckered into talking too much to people who are really only a sliver of the electorate. So many dangers lie ahead. So many bloggable dangers. Vloggable dangers!

Why, one could vlog advice to Kotecki about how his videos are a little too scripted and artificial. And there's another thing about the difference between the web and TV. You can't tumble into infinite regress on TV.

ADDED: Kotecki stops by the comments and defends himself against the charge that he's too scripted. Here's Kotecki's blog. Whatever I said about taste in vlog-styles, I have to approve of his taste in templates.

Here's Koteck talking with Jeff Jarvis about campaign videos.

"Hitler Image Used in Bush Campaign Web Ad."

So reads a misleading headline to an AP article printed in today's NYT. Here's the key text:

President Bush's campaign contains online video, removed from a liberal group's Web site months ago and disavowed, that features the Nazi dictator.

The Bush Internet video, which was sent electronically to 6 million supporters, intersperses clips of speeches by Democrats John Kerry, Al Gore and Howard Dean with the footage of Hitler. ...

The 77-second video on the Bush-Cheney re-election site splices footage of Kerry, the presumptive nominee, and his 2004 rival Dean along with 2000 nominee Gore and film director Michael Moore. The spot calls them Kerry's "Coalition of the Wild-eyed." Clips of Hitler's image are seen throughout the spot.

The video clip in question was a contest entry on the MoveOn.org website back in January. Should Bush remove this video from his site, as requested by the Kerry campaign? Does Kerry deserve to have the most vitriolic Democrats hung around his neck? Whoever made the MoveOn.org commercial wasn't even a Kerry supporter.

The Bush campaign's position is that unless Kerry "denounces" these Democrats, their video is appropriate. Whatever effect it has on the content of George Bush's website, Kerry ought to distance himself from Democrats who resort to this kind of ugly language and imagery, but he can't control everyone that is talking about him and he doesn't need to "denounce" them anymore that Bush needs to "denounce" his own supporters who overstate things too and make ridiculous comparisons. The important thing is for the candidates not to sink to that level, and Bush using the images of Hitler on his website does drag him down. He's trying to portray the other side as a bunch of crazies. The video ends with a portrayal of Bush as the sane and rational one we should trust. Yet what has gone before is itself an attempt to appeal to irrational emotions--to generate fear and revulsion.

There is a lot of hostility and ugliness going around right now. It is a real challenge to both candidates to find a way to fight hard without becoming part of that ugliness.

(I had to laugh at the attempt to make Kerry look bad by showing him using the word "ass," after Cheney's recent denouncement of Senator Leahy.)