Dick The Lesser
There's an interesting photo on the White House website today. It's a single shot of Dick Cheney disembarking Air Force Two in Japan.... Instead, he comes off looking like, well, a typical Vice President. Is it just arbitrary that Cheney seems so small, or so isolated?
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Stand Up Or Stand Down?
What makes the photo intriguing -- featuring bipartisan Bush escalation critics Hagel, Lugar and Biden (the first two, Republicans)-- is its thoroughly bipolar nature. At the confrontation point, are these guys going to master the fine print, honor their seriousness and determination, and push forward ... or will they...
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Bush On The Other Hand
What makes the VietVets.org ad so powerful is not just the visual impact, but the perfect blending of rhetorical and somatic metaphor -- hands and hands. As the cadence builds, you keep waiting for the "other hand." And when you get it, you don't expect the singular, offsetting comparison...
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Your Turn: I Want My Yglesias TV (… Or Do I?)
Because I do have a category called "Blogging Focus," and because The BAG -- with its unique visual pathway into political commentary -- does not always link enough to, or draw the consistent reciprocal attention of "the big boys" (with some noteworthy exceptions), I thought we might turn our...
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Your Turn: Bugle Boy
Once again, our trusty stimulus, The Economist, rides to the rescue (if you can take one more post about Bugle Boy).
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Rumsfeld's Memo: The Larger Picture
Almost as revealing -- which the photo editors must have picked up on in choosing this spot-on file photo to accompany the LA Times story -- is what Rumsfeld and this Administration are good at instead.
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Straight Party Line
This U.S. State Department press release photo is mentioned in Frank Rich's column in yesterday's NYT, showing Laura Bush watching as Secretary of State Condi Rice swears in Mark Dybul as U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator. Mr. Dybul's partner, Jason Claire, holds the Bible.
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Tuesday Bulletin Board: "America♥Lebanon"
For someone who said she refused to engage in shuttle diplomacy, however, and was on her way to Rome, Condi's sudden appearance in Beirut this morning was another White House piece of media theatrics.... US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (L) and Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora shake hands...
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Your Turn: Just A Little Cross Right Now
The BAG is quite impressed with this photo-illustration on the latest cover of TIME. A good image is one that, regardless of familiarity, keeps calling you back.... On first pass, the power differential is blatantly obvious.... There are other things: A deeper way to read this is as a...
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The "A" Team
Note: Due to a service outage, Typepad lost all data posted over the past 12 hours. I had a back-up of this entry, but unfortunately, all the comments were lost. My apologies. (click to expand) Faced with a delicate and highly complex foreign relations challenge in North Korea,...
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Your Turn: Running On Iraq
If you read the LAT story on Bush's jog with Army Staff Sgt. Christian Bagge, you'll see the vet was determined to make it happen. "I'm very proud of what I've done for this country," Bagge said. "I'm proud of my wounds."
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Who's In The House
One topic that seems fairly consistent across political blogs is the impact we are having -- on the culture, the media, the punditocracy, and the party. With the exception of the recent post I did on the visual coverage of YearlyKos, my niche doesn't lend itself too much to...
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Your Turn: Fore!
I realize The BAG has plumbed the Gitmo subject fairly thoroughly this week. However, I've been diligently looking for a good "Your Turn" to turn you loose on, and I really like this one. I'm coming to understand that the best images for communal analysis are tthose that seem...
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Your Turn: I Know These Guys Love Uniforms, But….
I have to admit, when this was first sent to me, I thought it was an outtake from the old Hogan's Hero's TV show. Instead, according to the caption: White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, left, and White House Counselor Dan Barlett, ride in a military helicopter wearing helmets and...
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Your Turn: No Body I Recognize
The BAG received a number of messages about this pic. Intuitively, this makes a great rip. The "why," however, might be slightly less than obvious, or unanimous -- just like there are probably four of five basic ways to create a logical gestalt out of about eight, or so, discrete...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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