A few words about the various controversies surrounding that Situation Room picture.
Since 2001, the Interwebs and Photoshop have evolved to the point where parody shit like the shots of Obama with a video game handset become obligatory.
And erasures of powerful Western women from the photo by groups of Medieval patriarchal asshats who don’t like the idea of women having power—even if it’s not Bad Motherfucker power—are the same thing. Changing the image to either ridicule or recast it to fit their own worldview.
But such ridicule or revision is necessary only because an image becomes powerful/iconic due to how it seems to capture the immediacy of a situation. In this case, a situation in the Situation Room.
And then people begin to alter/edit/amend it in order to fit it to their own humorous or bullshit situations, their own power dymamics. But whether it’s mockery or misogyny, either way, that doesn’t happen without the power of the original photo.
And one thing I didn’t point out about the Bad Motherfuckers in the Situation Room since I’ve been so remiss on Slog about the Mariners and the Cubs and Silva and Bradley:
Two of the Bad Motherfuckers are from Chicago. As is the woman erased by the asshats.
I thought the image changed when it turned out they weren’t watching the operation at all, but waiting for sporadic updates, making them more like “Anticipating Bureaucrats” than “Bad Motherfuckers.”
If Milton Bradley can’t make it here (on a mediocre team in a city with simple fans and soft beat writers) then he can’t make it anywhere.
they are bad and they would fuck your mother for financial or political gain. good point.
@3 Indeed, from the Chicago School, too.
Ha! I was in the dentist chair waiting for the shot to kick in when I saw Milty was gone. I forgot I posted after the gas. Next time your in Seattle I owe you a $9.50 Safeco beer!
Wait… photoshopping a video game controller into Obama’s hand to make a joke is “the same thing” as erasing the women from the photo? I… just don’t get that. I guess I see a difference between humor and a concerted effort to diminish the role of women in the world.
Maybe it’s because the video game controller somehow diminishes the “bad motherfucker” vibe CF was getting when he initially assumed what was happening in the picture before we all found out that wasn’t what was happening in the picture. It’s hard to tell, because I still don’t know how watching a monitor of soldiers storm a house and kill a bunch of unarmed people makes someone a “bad motherfucker.” But then, I’ve never been a bartender in Chicago.
What Julie said. (Thanks, Julie!)
I just watched the fifth episode of “The Richard Pryor Show” (1977) and it had Maya Angelou in a serio-comic skit as Willie the Drunk’s wife. Also John Belushi was a guest star.
Stuff like that doesn’t happen any more.
Hey…here it is!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zeq50Y0WW…
Cynical opportunists posing for a photo op showing them pretending to watch a livefeed of soldiers killing an unarmed CIA created patsy are “bad motherfuckers” indeed. They probably would fuck their mothers to drag America into another war, or better yet, stage another falseflag attack.
Every photo ever taken was stage-managed. Get over it. A blowhard on the radio was complaining that without the Osama bin Laden death photo we were denied our Iwo Jima moment, our image to sum up our victory in WWII. But the Iwo Jima image wasn’t a picture of Hitler’s corpse, and we have our iconic photo, which, fittingly, is a picture of serious people projecting power in a serious manner, which may not inspire any hokey bronze statuettes but sums up the world today pretty damn well. It’ll do.
@7, you cry those tears for that unarmed motherfucker real hard now, OK?
@11 It’s called due process. If we can’t give even a pretense of it we don’t get to brag that we’re better like we do all the time. By the way saying we want a functional legal system that treats all people equally is not the same as saying we sympathize or feel bad for the criminals. Grow up.
@ 2 Who the hell are you calling soft, Milton didn’t make it because he was ahead case. This is not your father’s Mariner’s team the GM know what he is doing, he isn’t trading away all our good young talent.
@ 12, not to go all gung ho here, but in the case of al Qaeda , it is war. But just to pretend, for a moment, that it was merely a mass murder case and that they should have arrested OBL, do you think he could have gotten a fair trial?
@12, Osama bin Laden got all the due process he deserved. Grow up yourself. The clue phone is ringing; you should answer it.
@13, Bradley did not get DFAed because he was a head case. He got DFAed because he can’t play baseball anymore. Neither can Carlos Silva. He actually lasted a couple of months longer in the majors than Silva, who is currently pitching in A ball. As I said at the time, neither one of them was an important player worth getting excited about.
@ 13, Milton’s always been a head case. He just used to be one who was good at hitting a baseball, and they cut him because he can’t do that anymore. Make no mistake – he would have been traded if being a head case were his only problem, because there’s always some team that can use a good hitter.
Have fun in the independent leagues, Milt.
@14 First, rules apply to wars and war criminals too. Or at least they did at one point. The fact that we’re in an undeclared war still doesn’t excuse the fact we invaded a foreign country with the intent to assassinate–which is still a violation of even domestic law. They would no doubt use the AUMF as cover if anyone really cared.
We put the leftover Nazis through trials and we executed them or imprisoned them. It may have not even been “fair” but it was still a fucking trial. The original 1992 WTC planner was tried and convicted in a normal court.
@15 Your standard fallback when you disagree is flaming. I am not accepting advice from you on matters of maturity.
@15
Osama didn’t deserve a trial, but we owed it to ourselves and our own justice system to give him the fairest trial possible.
my favorite was “The Situation in the Situation Room.”
@13: Who am I calling soft? All the dumbasses who cheer for the hat trick, the hydro races and the dancing groundskeepers. This is the easiest-to-please crowd in Major League Baseball. If Milton has to wear earplugs at home to drown out these fans, then he needs to get out of the league.
Love the serendipity with Milton.
And @JulieinEugene: I wasn’t saying that mocking the President and erasing HRC are the same thing, I said they were parallel things, “mockery or misogyny.” I actually like the one with Obama playing a ukulele. Means the Birthers have lost! He’s from Hawaii.
@18, I’ve posted more closely reasoned commentary here than you will ever dream of. Your analogy with WWII is null. This fight isn’t close to over. We eliminated an enemy commander in the field. Well done. First thing we’ve done right in a decade. And we didn’t use the “enhanced interrogation” that Messrs. Cheney and Bush still pine for so openly; we used skilled police work, and then sent in the Seals. Well done. Nothing to cry about there at all, at all.
@21, every team in the majors has the hat trick and all the others. We didn’t invent any of that. I saw the hat trick on the scoreboard at the Oakland Coliseum 30 years ago. And if you’re looking for easy to please baseball crowds, look no further than the vacuous throngs at Wrigley Field, who don’t even care if their team is any good or not. Mariner fans express their displeasure by staying away in droves; Cubs fans would show up if they put ten year old girls out there (who might actually outperform the actual Cubs).
@22, are you sure “serendipity” is the word you’re looking for there? No one has ever been pleasantly surprised by Milton.
One thing that Chicago Fan had right was the implied point that people view reality through the filter of their worldviews and biases. In this case, credulous “true believer” types see what they are told to see: all-powerful sincerely serious “badasses” in a spontaneous moment watching a “real” event. On the other hand, skeptics and critical thinkers tend to see a room full of war criminals, opportunists, liars and idiots (or various combinations), posing like they’re watching a “real” event ebellished for public consumption or a completely manufactured non-event.
@11, I’ve never cried for bin Laden but I do shed tears for these people:
http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/rawagall…
and these people:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/cl…
For every scumbag killed through lack of due process, at least one and usually more innocents die. But, hey, they aren’t YOUR family members, right? They aren’t even Americans! And they’re so poor!
You know, you sound exactly like a Republican when you talk about this subject.
The clue phone is ringing; you should answer it.
Here’s hoping you’ll be old enough to vote in 2012!
And Obama wasn’t “in the field.” He was resting comfortably in allied territory. (Also, he wasn’t in a fire-fight and he didn’t use his wife as a shield, just in case you didn’t get the memo).
@23 You may very well have posted reasoned commentary elsewhere–oh, that I can dream of, too! What a fucking accomplishment. Please. In fact, I agree with a lot of what you say, but you have a tendency to just flame away if you want to cheerlead or disagree. And you have in this instance. You are undoubtedly and admittedly a tribalist partisan, so your take on this situation is predictable and understandable.
“We eliminated an enemy commander in the field. Well done. “
Weak, weak, weak. He’s either an enemy commander or not. If he is, then it was a war crime to shoot an unarmed enemy commander. You’re right though. WWII was an actual war and this (The War on Terror) is an undeclared illegal military action encouraged by a cowardly American public.
Your endorsement of neoconservative rhetoric here isn’t an instance of well-reasoned commentary. You ignored what I said about sympathizing or feeling sorry for criminals–yet repeated that line (e.g. crying). Intellectually dishonest, IMO. Nobody’s fucking crying over bin Laden’s death.