Thursday, May 21, 2015

THE EXPLOSION OF ANTI-CLINTON ART THAT ISN'T ACTUALLY HAPPENING

The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway tweeted this this morning:



Twitchy picked up on it, and the righties had a hearty chuckle. Then, by early afternoon, the Washington Free Beacon was claiming that these posters were being spotted all around ABC headquarters on the West Side of Manhattan. Glenn Beck's Blaze picked up the story a couple of hours later.

Here are some of the additional photos the Free Beacon posted:





Um, I'm not clear how that first one is managing to float in air. Is it attached to anything? The second one looks a bit hinky too. Are they real or are they Photoshop?

Here's the thing: I walk by this area twice a day on my way to and from work. I didn't see these in the morning. Now, maybe I missed them -- I hadn't seen any of the right-wing items I've linked, so I wasn't really looking for anti-Clinton propaganda.

But on the way home, I did look -- and I didn't see anything. I tried to photograph the area, but the light was fading and my phone's battery was dying and I took the pictures without looking at them, so they're absurdly blurry. Still: nothing. No Hillary and George anywhere.







Every so often, there's something like this on right-wing sites and social media -- someone does a poster like this denouncing Hillary or the president or some other Democrat, claims the posters are all over New York or L.A., and Wingnuttia expresses delight. (Example here.) But if the current posters ever actually were on display, I'm pretty sure they were on display just long enough to be photographed. (C'mon, folks -- wheat-paste your work if you're so proud of it.)

Righties, for some reason, are envious of Robbie Conal, who's been posting political art for years. The righty art even looks like Conal's, though Conal's work is much more visually powerful:





Here's the thing, though: this doesn't accomplish much. Conal's work in the Reagan years won him a lot of fans -- but it didn't really slow Reagan down. What the righties are doing now is just as unlikely to change the course of history. Or I should say it's even less likely, because they don't even seem to have the cojones to put their work up and leave it up.

2 comments:

Glennis said...

Photoshopped, definitely. But one has to ask, why photoshopped so lamely? Why not shop it onto something believable instead of hanging in mid-air?

A while back some Breitbartian claimed similar posters were in Los Angeles "all over the ghetto." They were really just on one utility box within a parking shuttle's drive from LAX.

Victor said...

Definitely photoshopped!

And thank you for looking around for them.