Huffington Porn

Arianna Huffington wants to help the Democrats. How best to do this? For a start, she enlisted "multiple-award-winning ad exec Rich Silverstein," the man who gave us 'Got Milk?' starring a bunch of celebrities with pseudo-pornographic splish-splashes on their mouths, to come up with this doozy of a "visual blog." The idea is to "help the Democrats, who continue to struggle with framing an election where they are holding all the cards." It isn't hard to guess what popped into Silverstein's head, but since the eminently self-loving Not In Our Name group already appropriated 'Got Democracy?,' he at least had to do a little bit of brain work. He came up with something that holds to the autopolitic theme: 3 hot money shots for masturbatory liberals.  These posters illustrate nicely both the nuance commonly found in the dominating mindset of American Democrats almost as well as they illustrate how the internet paradigm is negatively impacting political thought. Never we mind that influential people are looking to advertisers, the most sleazily manipulative, dirty capitalist douchebags on the planet for their "grasp of what makes for effective communication in radio, movies, TV, and online." This in itself is, of course, an instant compromise of principle to anyone claiming even remotely left/liberal credentials. But what's worse, everything here is a shortcut–as if they were a slew of mentally hyperlinked keywords, each of which leads to the same page: 'EVIL' in big, bold-faced lettering. If I could respond to this visually, I might make a poster that says in the middle 'Bush & Co. Sux. DUH.' I've written here, as have many of my colleagues, regarding the detestable and even impeachable offenses committed by several of the folks who appear on the 'NAMES' roster. But how is it that Paul Bremer and George Tenet got such small-time billing compared to Harriet Miers? If this is visual communication of such a high order, then are we really to understand that the President's failed cronyist appointment of Mrs. Miers was more sinister than the criminal errors of the CIA and the mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq? And why, if we agree that Bush's Texanochristianity is a problem, would one chide him for the way his administration has handled Intelligent Design while simultaneously mocking the rhetoric he deploys in waging a war against people who enforce a variation of that theory by means of indiscriminate murder? The 'SLOGANS' poster is by far the most problematic. The red flags these black words are intended to throw up in the minds of their audience exist for one reason alone: they were uttered by one or another Bush Jr. era Republican. So what happens when those words happen to be 'A Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism?' How is it that Democrats, liberals and leftists find themselves scoffing? Or 'Stay the Course' for that matter…many rightly ask if there could have been a 9/11 had we 'stayed the course' in Afghanistan instead of abandoning Afghans to a decade of civil war and eventual Islamist totalitarianism. If we had stayed the course in 1991, and not 'Cut and Run' the list of likely outcomes would be hard to escape. Saddam Hussein wouldn't have had the ability to torture his people another twelve years, nor would the United States have had to face the wrath of a people who weren't impressed with it's "liberation" skills the first time around (you know, when Bush called for Iraqis to rise up and overthrow the regime, then stood by and did nothing while gunships mowed men down in the thousands). The 'EVENTS' installment manages to avoid many of the trappings of the other two. It's a heinous laundry list that should make any decent person ashamed to be American. It is indeed time for a drastic change in the way our leaders manage our affairs. But if Blackwater, armorless soldiers, and ID crusades didn't bother you enough already, writing down words in scary block letters and stuffing them on a poster isn't going to do much. Or rather, if it does, we have an even larger problem. Such convictions, brought to you by the Got Milk? guy are hardly enough to sustain genuine, overarching social changes. Huffington and Silverstein aren't currently doing anything more than giving a complacent liberal majority the chance to jerk themselves off.