Canadian Cincinnatus

Maybe the kinds are all right after all: according to the LA Times they don’t care about movie stars

The LA Times interviewed a ‘posse’ of young people about some current movies. Here are some of their comments:

“The film is populated with prominent names, notably Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel and Bryan Cranston. But of the 11 members of the posse, only two knew anyone who was in the film (both of them pinpointing Farrell).”

“But even such top-tier stars as Will Smith, Robert Downey Jr. and Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson barely registered — and not always in a positive fashion. When discussing “Snow White and the Huntsman,” Max Nath, 16, could characterize Charlize Theron only as “that other woman.””

“After hearing the posse share its views, it was clear that it has a serious case of superhero fatigue. That even includes “The Avengers,” which is already breaking box-office records, but finished in the middle of the pack with the posse. As Isaac Galan, 15, put it: “It really feels a little cartoonish. I mean, is it a movie or a video game?”

For the posse, the superhero-style films, from “G.I. Joe” to “Spider Man” and “Men in Black” were simply underwhelming. “The frequency of all those superhero movies makes you think they’re just doing them to get another movie out,” said Jeremy Arnold, 17. “I wish they’d think of something more original. I mean, how many superheroes is too many superheroes?””

Fantastic. The less enamored they are with ephemeral pop stars and “role models” (i.e. people who play heroes but aren’t heroes themselves), the better.

For what it is worth, I believe their ambivalence to movie stars is a reflection of the fact that the very idea of a ‘movie star’ is in low repute these days. In Hollywood’s golden age, movie stars had a high reputation because the studios were very careful about cultivating their image. No alienating political opinions and no scandals (keep your dirty linen indoors). Or you are out. I think that Hollywood has been living on this cultural capital until recently. But they have finally spent it. Years of tawdry sex scandals, idiotic  opinions, shameless look-at-me behaviour and hypocritical pronouncements that serve only to highlight their intellectual limitations have finally taken their toll. Though the stars probably don’t know it yet, it will take years of hard work to regain their good will with the public.

 

Why is nobody paying attention to the racist mass murders in Tulsa, Oklahoma?

Over the weekend, two white men were charged in the shooting deaths of three black people and the wounding of two others in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The killers were both charged with murder and “hate crime charges”. They have both confessed to the killings but have pled not guilty to murder. The killings appear to be random in that there is no known connection between the victims and the killers. Given this and the fact that the only common denominator between the victims is that they are all black, it is reasonable to assume that racial hatred was the motive (in spite of protestations to the contrary by one of the accused).

So, if the media is so concerned about anti-black racism, where is the collective outrage over this slam-dunk case of racial hate-crime? Where is the sustained moral indignation?

Considering the fact that the circumstances of the Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman case are much more ambiguous, why is that case garnering so much more media oxygen? Why didn’t the New Black Panther Party issue a bounty on the heads of the two white killers? Why hasn’t Mike Tyson called for them to be shot? And why hasn’t Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson organized demonstrations and threatened riots? 

Could it be that the problem with the Tulsa case is that it is too uncontroversial? Not uncontroversial in that people aren’t morally outraged by it, but uncontroversial in that a vast majority of the people are outraged over it in the same way. In other words, if everybody – black and white - finds these killings utterly deplorable, there is no opportunity to sow racial discord. At best, you have a Dead Man Walking – style debate about capital punishment. These days, ho hum.

In contrast, recent polls show the opinions of whites and blacks divergent on the Martin – Zimmerman case, with whites lining up behind the neighbourhood watch volunteer and blacks lining up behind the innocent victim. Lots of potential for controversy – and getting your name in the paper. Just like the O J Simpson trial!

Something to consider when pondering the motives of those sensationalizing the events in Sanford, Florida.

 

 

A most excellent definition of racism

My last post about political correctness, prompted by the Derbyshire affair, got me thinking about the definition of racism itself. For a long time, I have had the vague notion that the word ‘racism’ has been redefined by the Political Indoctrinators to mean something more than what most people mean by that word, and that this ambiguity is used by the PC-heads to their advantage. In other words, they have a wide-ranging, hazy definition that they use to ensnare victims but have a narrow, specific definition that they use to describe the general concept of racism to the general public. In this way, people who are not really paying attention (i.e. centrists or moderates) end up assuming that people charged with racism are guilty according to an exacting definition (that they were never accused of).

To my rescue comes Eric S Raymond, who has cut to the heart of the matter by analyzing the current definition racism, determining what is wrong with it and positing an improved definition in its place.

So fasten your seatbelts, here we go:

“One of the most important reasons not to tell ourselves pretty lies about unpleasant realities is so that we do not hand evil people the power of being the only ones who are willing to speak the truth.”

“A rather larger number [of commenters to his blog] accused of me of holding to a standard for “racism” and “racist thinking” that is too narrow, because I reject ever describing as “racist” people who speak beliefs that are factually justified – even if those beliefs are negative about specific racial groups and even if they are expressed with intent to provoke. I hold that truth should be considered a sufficient defense against charges of racism just as it is against slander and libel.”

“[M]any commenters were willing to condemn him [Derbyshire] as a racist even though they conceded that his fact base is largely sound and there is no evidence that his errors (if any) are dishonest. I even had one person defend this expansive definition of “racist” on the grounds that this is how almost everyone understands the word.

I am writing to argue that such a loose definition of “racist” is a dangerous mistake.”

“Nobody sane wants to hand power and credibility to neo-Nazis or the Christian Identity movement or Confederate revanchists or any of the other tiny clusters of bigoted wack jobs at the fringes of American politics. But that is exactly what we do every time we tell pretty lies about race. It is exactly what we do every time we use “racist” as a verbal cudgel against people who deviate in the slightest from politically-correct thinking. And it is exactly what we do when we honk endlessly about the need for a “national conversation about race”, then run the likes of John Derbyshire out of town on a rail for speaking honestly.

To avoid putting bigots and racists on the right and truthful side of the argument, we need a strict definition of “racist” claims as those which (a) prejudice individual judgment of individuals, and (b) are based on false generalizations. We cannot allow true generalizations to be considered racist. If we do that, either (a) we can no longer condemn racism as such, or (b) we get stuck in a situation where we’re not allowed to notice that white men can’t jump and black men can’t swim, wondering why our sports teams aren’t “balanced”, and falsely ascribing to bigotry what arises from natural differences in distributions of ability. And the poison spreads.

Only the haters and creeps and race-hustlers of all colors win under either of those outcomes. So please do not give evil people the gift of being sloppy in your thinking and your language [emphasis added].”

My only quibble with Raymond’s definition is the addition of the phrase “even if they are expressed with intent to provoke” to “I reject ever describing as ‘racist’ people who speak beliefs that are factually justified – even if those beliefs are negative about specific racial groups.” I think we have a civic duty to be polite to our fellow citizens and not provoke them unnecessarily. The truth should be sacred but picking a fight has nothing to do with a search for truth. Legally, there is such a thing as ‘fighting words’.

 

Jonathan Kay: the National Post’s moralistic PC scold

You know, one of the most noxious and morally toxic intellectual concepts at work in our society today is the doctrine of Political Correctness. It is nothing more than a way of stifling intellectual debate in the guise of moral purity. While it does occasionally suppress the genuine hatemonger, it also empowers smug moral preeners, petty tyrants and a rogue’s gallery of bounders and phoneys at the expense of genuinely reasonable men.

All of this loathsomeness was on display in the reaction to John Derbyshire’s article that appeared last Thursday in Taki's Magazine.  In his article, which was inspired by the Trayvon Martin – George Zimmerman fiasco, Derb gave the following advice, “Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods” as well as other similar admonitions. This got the PC scolds heading for the fainting couch, though I hasten to add, none of them had the integrity to assert that places like the South Bronx and Camden, New Jersey are perfectly safe, as in “hey, I jog there all the time.”

True to form, instead of challenging Derbyshire on particulars, they demanded his resignation from National Review (even though the offending article didn’t appear there, but hey, he’s got to be fired from somewhere and Takimag ain’t that important relative to his thoughtcrime).

Left unstated was an explanation of how this two-minute hate could be reconciled with the near universal applause that Jesse Jackson received for saying essentially the same thing when he told the story about how he was walking down the street late one night and felt relieved when he turned around and saw that the footsteps behind him were made by a white man.

Also left unstated was an explanation of how the racism charge is consistent with Derb’s evident sympathy for the Hermann Cain presidential campaign. But PC inquisitors never seem to feel the need to justify their serious accusations at a man’s character.

To add insult to injury, while chiding Derbyshire for his lack of racial sophistication, they silently pass over key passages in his offending article, things like:

“The default principle in everyday personal encounters is, that as a fellow citizen, with the same rights and obligations as yourself, any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship.”

“As with any population of such a size, there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black). They come fat, thin, tall, short, dumb, smart, introverted, extroverted, honest, crooked, athletic, sedentary, fastidious, sloppy, amiable, and obnoxious. There are black geniuses and black morons. There are black saints and black psychopaths.”

“Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:”

These are important qualifiers to the advice Derbyshire gave. If you consciously fail to mention them while condemning his advice, you are being dishonest.

A partial exception to this rule was made by moral pygmy Jonathan Kay over at the National Post. While refraining from actually stating his qualifiers, he elliptically alluded to them thus:

“This is not ordinary racism. It is more interesting and antique than that: explicitly racialist in substance, but also ornamented with editorial grace notes and exhortations to humane acts of tokenism. One is reminded of, say, old-fashioned British types putting up their slide show from a safari in South Africa, or a charity trip to an inner-city school.”

You know what Jonathan? Here’s a piece of advice: since you are very unlikely to have a window into John Derbyshire’s soul, why don’t you confine your criticism to what he has actually written and said, and refrain from conflating him with the strawmen that inhabit your psycho-racial masturbatory fantasies.

Oh... I don’t have a window onto your soul? So that I don’t have any direct knowledge of your psycho-racial masturbatory fantasies, assuming there are any? Sorry about that, old boy.

Kay’s description of Derbyshire as an “old-fashioned British type” and a “crank” that is “out of touch with the times” evokes the image of the stereotypical xenophobic loser, sitting in his basement all day while occasionally peering out the window at all these strange, new-fangled foreigners who are mysteriously popping up in his neighbourhood; which (by comparison) makes ‘nice people’ like Kay look compassionate, cosmopolitan and worldly-wise. Oh Jonathan, what a swell guy you are!

Left out of this narrative is the fact that in his early 20’s, Derbyshire departed his native England for a non-white place (Hong Kong), where he lived for a many years, mastering the Chinese language and learning its culture (his articles often contain references to classic Chinese poetry). He also married a Chinese woman with the result that his two children are only half-white.

Yep, racist stuff here. Since Derb’s life story closely parallels the biography of Bull Connor, I wonder why Jonathan Kay left this detail out? Sure is more damning than Kay’s comparatively lilly-white biography of hanging out with one-percenters.

Kay then made one of the most idiotic accusations in this whole affair:

“His writings about blacks, in particular, were full of references drawn from comparative-intelligence studies that, however disreputable, at least suggested a nominal quest for fact-finding and testable hypotheses. 

Ever the mathematician, Derbyshire endlessly spouts the language of percentiles and cohorts and standard deviations.”

So data and reason are now racist tricks? Who knew? Thanks Jonathan! I’ll be sure to avoid these ‘dog whistles’ in the future.

(I suppose Chinese poetry is another dog whistle.)

In spite of Kay’s assertion that Derb is “out of touch with the times” (which Derb freely acknowledges – say? can you really be out of touch with the times if you know you are out of touch with the times?), history is often not kind to the enforcers of orthodoxy. Times change; priorities change; unreasonable, ideologically driven hysterias change. The inquisitors in the Galileo trail - even the Pope himself - are only remembered these days as the men who persecuted one of the greatest scientists of all time; the accused in the Salem witch trials are remembered as poor victims while the men who tried them are viewed as vicious, stupid fanatics; and these days, Oscar Wilde’s indecency trial is widely seen to be a miscarriage of justice. 

A hundred years hence, when politics has changed and therefore the standards of political correctness have changed, I wonder if today’s PC transgressors will be viewed in better light and whether their accusers, if they are remembered at all, will be seen to be inhabiting the dung-heap of history.

 

The George Zimmerman – Trayvon Martin media fiasco

Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, reports what the far-left Mother Jones magazine says about the media circus surrounding that killing in Florida: 

KEVIN DRUM AT MOTHER JONES ON NBC’S ZIMMERMAN DECEPTION: “This is now fated to be Exhibit A in conservative charges of mainstream media bias for about the next century or so. And who can blame them? What a cockup.”

Specifically, what Kevin Drum was referring to was the police dispatch tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call that NBC had edited. This is what they did:

To refresh our memories, here’s what transpired during the call and is recorded on the audio:

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, [begin ellipsis] or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

911 DISPATCHER: Okay, is this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic? [end ellipsis]

ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

And here’s how NBC’s “error” rendered that sequence:

“This guy looks like he’s up to no good … he looks black,” Zimmerman told a police dispatcher from his car.

You know, I think this kind of thing used to happen all the time but there was nobody to notice. The difference these days is that now there is an alternate media, as well as conservative activists who understand political war and know how to push back.

 

Because the mainstream media is not used to that, they end up being caught flat-footed and exposed.

 

Controversial artist paints Obama burning the US Constitution

One would be forgiven for thinking believing that it is all but impossible for an artist to be a controversial these days. After all, we have Piss Christ, Artist’s Shit, Richard Serra’s portrait of George W Bush as Saturn Devouring His Son and Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 dadaist masterpiece: the Fountain.

But now we know what it takes for an artist to be truly controversial. So all you aspiring avant-garde controversialists gather round and listen: painting a realistic picture of President Obama in less than flattering light. I know, I know, even speaking such a thing is itself borderline-racism, so pass the smelling salts and get near the fainting couch when you take a gander at Jon McNaughton’s latest portrait of President Obama.

Personally, as an aficionado of the avant-garde, I prefer his Forgotten Man. At least, unlike Picasso, he doesn’t paint anybody with both eyes on the same side of the face. That is getting so passe.

 

Why was Sandra Fluke offended by Rush Limbaugh’s comments anyway?

As is well known by now, Rush Limbaugh had called a young lady and left-wing activist, who testified in Congress about contraception, disparaging terms that implied that she is sexually promiscuous.

Given that she is an advocate of free contraception, was active in suppressing the political free speech of pro-life groups at Cornell and is on record as supporting a mandate for free sex-change operations, it would seem to me that one would be on safe ground to assert that Ms. Flake is an advocate of the New Morality, the sexual philosophy that rose to prominence in the 1960’s. One of the tenets of this belief system is that any sexual activity that occurs between two consenting adults is OK. Even more than that, it is morally agnostic about those activities. In other words, if somebody morally elevates one form of sexual activity over another, that person is guilty of ‘judgementalism’ (a very serious charge indeed). As an activist for the New Morality, Sandra Fluke would have to believe all of these things.

So I repeat my question: regardless of the whether Ms. Fluke herself is sexually promiscuous or not, why would she take offense if Rush Limbaugh described her in terms that she herself considers to be morally neutral?

Today, we are all Rush Limbaugh

Make no mistake about it, the media frenzy that greeted Rush Limbaugh’s uncomplimentary remarks on left-wing campus activist Sandra Fluke is a deliberate coordinated ambush, and most definitely not the spontaneous outrage over ‘unacceptable comments’ that it pretends to be.

How do I know this?

Look at the MSM’s silence over the left’s celebratory tweets and comments about Andrew Breitbart’s sudden death last week. Matt Yglesias, star blogger over at Slate, said this: “Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world is slightly improved with @AndrewBreitbart dead.” Click on this link to see worse, much worse. 

Other outrages the media has been curiously silent over: Jimmy Fallon Show band playing “Lyin Ass Bitch” to introduce Michelle Bachmann; President Obama calling Tea Partiers “tea baggers” (a sexual slur); the George W Bush assassination porn film; the ‘Bush is Hitler’ chanting in the good ol’ days when dissent was patriotic (in case you are wondering, it no longer is, but may be again after November); the aggressive anti-Semitism of the Occupy crowd; the misogynistic Barack Obama donor and one-percenter Bill Maher insulting every woman in sight; not to mention all the vitriol that has been hurled at Sarah Palin by the MSM.

If the MSM had any conscience at all, they would have hammered at this stuff instead of sweeping it under the rug.

It may be argued that the case between Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and George W Bush is different from Sandra Fluke because unlike them, she is not a career politician but rather an idealistic student who merely wants to express her views. For starters, this gauzy portrait ignores her role in silencing pro-life groups on Cornell, which suggests that she is not a stranger to the kind of bare-knuckle street politics the left specializes in. And it doesn’t explain the MSM’s moral slumber when 60 year old David Letterman mocked Sarah Palin’s 14 year old daughter with rape jokes.

So by cataloguing all this left-wing slander, Cincinnatus, are you saying that two wrongs make a right? - that it somehow excuses what Rush said?

No. But juxtaposing the Sandra Fluke incident with this bile provides some much needed perspective (i.e. that Rush Limbaugh’s transgressions are relatively minor). It also suggests that the MSM's motivations are, how shall I put it, less than pure. Specifically, that they are not offended but merely engaged in a premeditated ambush.

Of course, they could not have known that Rush was going to call Sandra Flake nasty names when he did, but I bet they had the campaign organized and lying in wait for the day he said something provocative. When he did, they pounced.

You can see the progression: first, Lou Dobbs on CNN (for highlighting the illegal alien problem); then Glen Beck (for exposing George Soros); and now, the biggest fish of all: Rush Limbaugh.

The fact that a number of key sponsors are backing away from him so quickly, when they stood by him through past controversies, suggests prior planning.

The RINO instinct would be to distance ourselves from Rush, tut-tutting loudly and moralistically about ‘extremism’. As usual, the RINO advice is 180 degrees out of phase with the correct strategy. The situation is critical because Rush is the biggest conservative voice out there. If he goes, picking off everybody else is just a mopping up operation. We must take to heart that you either hang together or you hang separately. If you want an alternate voice, right now it is do-or-die time. We have no choice but to stand by Rush.

Oh yes, what motivated Rush to make the comments he did? Perhaps, he took to heart what the New Civility exponent, Barack Obama, once said:

“Bring a gun to a knife fight.”

 

Social conservatives must look forward not backwards

A very interesting article by the invaluable James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal about the viability of social conservatism, both today and in the future:

“If liberal baby boomers stubbornly refuse to see the damage that their idea of "progress" has wrought, what about younger generations, for whom the sexual revolution was an inheritance, not a choice, and therefore perhaps not an essential component of personal identity, even among those on the left? Suzanne Venker, niece and co-author of the great antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly, is pessimistic, based on her reading of recent articles by two 40ish feminists:

In the widely read November 2011 Atlantic cover story, entitled "All the Single Ladies," singleton Kate Bolick declares that "it's time to embrace new ideas about romance and family--and to acknowledge the end of traditional marriage as society's highest ideal." . . .

Bolick's "All the Single Ladies"--which has been "recommended" 51,000 times on Facebook--is being made into a television series. So now the young people of America will get this message crammed down their throats every week. That should make for some good partnerships down the road, don't you think?

Indeed, Bolick is in good company--not just with Hollywood but with like-minded pontificators such as Hanna Rosin, who wrote a similar article last year called "The End of Men"--also in The Atlantic, and also widely read. The online version of this article incorporates a video in which Rosin (and her daughter) conclude, while sitting at a table opposite her son and (very emasculated) husband, that "girls are better than boys."

We see it differently. Having read the two Atlantic pieces, we find reason for encouragement in both. It's true that Rosin's video is deeply disturbing...

Yet she does acknowledge that the unbalancing of relations between the sexes has produced social problems:

It is fabulous to see girls and young women poised for success in the coming years. But allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men's-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge. Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women's rising power is perceived as a threat.

If the middle three sentences of that paragraph are accurate, then so is the perception Rosin describes in the last sentence. It is a good sign that a left-wing feminist like Rosin can acknowledge the problem.

As for Bolick, her agenda seems to be therapeutic more than political. At age 29, she dumped a boyfriend--who was, in her telling, a perfectly decent, attractive guy--because "something was missing." A decade later, she realizes that her expectations were unrealistic and her prospects of marriage are slim.

Now she wants society to change in order to assist her in rationalizing away her regret. ... That's not politics, it's self-absorption.

Here is a prediction: Even if Rick Santorum is not the next president, and even if Barack Obama crushes him in the general election (the latter, though not the former, is a big if), social conservatism will continue to grow in size and importance over the next couple of decades. That is to say, if Santorum loses, it will be in part because he is ahead of his time.

The social dislocation caused by feminism and the sexual revolution demands a political response, and so far the left has nothing to offer apart from bankrupting the country with more entitlements. It's encouraging to see a youngish left-wing feminist like Rosin have an inkling that there's a problem, but until the left starts thinking creatively about solutions, which will require a reconsideration of orthodoxies that date back to the 1960s and '70s, the social right will be the only game in town.”

I think this is about right. These days, social conservativism is mostly a reaction to the Sexual Revolution, and the great damage to society that it caused: plummeting birth rates, the breakdown of the family structure and the rise of fatherless families. Social conservatives just want is a return of the stern Calvinist elders of New Rochelle, circa the Dick van Dyck Show.

But, in spite of these modest goals, so-cons have been politically inept to a comical degree. All they seem to do is repeat preach-the-choir arguments like “it’s against morality” and “it’s against my religion”. Swell. The problem is that for many voters, the sexual freedoms of the 60’s are not against their morality or religion. They are perfectly fine with that stuff, even if they don’t exercise those liberties. So what do you say to them? How do you convince these voters that you do not embody H. L. Mencken’s definition of a Puritan: “somebody with a brooding fear that somehow, somewhere there is somebody out there having fun.”

To win them over, social conservatives must first recognize that there is no going back. So-cons are often accused of wanting to go back to the 1950’s world of Ozzie and Harriet. Many will reply, so what’s wrong with that? 

What’s wrong is that the 1950’s begat the 1960’s. And I don’t want to go back to that.

It has to be acknowledged is that the New Morality was partly a reaction to real social problems that then existed: the chief one being bored housewives. Historically, women were not bored. Traditional families worked together doing farm labour: mother, father and all children over 7. However, by the 50’s, the economy had advanced to the point where many women were underutilized; like Betty Draper in Mad Men, sitting around nervously smoking and popping tranquilizers while her husband is away all day taking on the world. Women needed to get into the workforce en mass, and to accomplish that, their political and social status needed to be raised considerably.

Nevertheless, a lot of the moral changes that accompanied feminism were wildly destructive. Dispassionate, analytical arguments detailing the societal destruction created by the flower child ethos exist, but you need to seek out the writings of people like Charles Murray, James Q Wilson and Theodore Dalrymple to find them. Obviously, the reliably left-wing MSM ignore this stuff as a matter of course, but to a large degree so do the spokesmen of social conservatism! They are too busy counting f-bombs on Howard Stern to make compelling arguments.

I think Taranto is right: if Santorum loses because of social conservatism, it is because he is ahead of his time; but I think he wouldn’t be ahead of his time if he spoke in terms understandable to the average secular American rather than via a religious devotion that those voters simply lack. 

 

Obama poster creator faces jail time because of his famous poster

Remember the famous “Hope” poster Obama used in his election campaign? The creator of that poster, Shepard Fairey, is currently facing jail time because of it. According to the New York Times:

The street artist Shepard Fairey, whose “Hope” campaign poster of Barack Obama became an enduring symbol of his last presidential campaign, pleaded guilty Friday to a charge stemming from his misconduct in trying to bolster claims in a lawsuit over which photograph had been used as a basis for the poster.

Mr. Fairey, 42, sued The Associated Press in 2009 after it contended he had infringed on the copyright of one of its photographs in creating the poster. Mr.

Fairey had claimed in his suit that he had used a different photograph of Mr. Obama, but later admitted that he had been mistaken and had tried to conceal his mistake, by destroying documents and fabricating others.

The Telegraph elaborated:

Fairey “went to extreme lengths to obtain an unfair and illegal advantage in his civil litigation, creating fake documents and destroying others in an effort to subvert the civil discovery process,” US Attorney Bharara Bharara said in a statement.

To cover up his false complaint, Fairey created multiple false and fraudulent documents attempting to show that he had used the photograph of Obama and Clooney, and tried to delete electronically stored documents that demonstrated that he had used the tightly cropped image, Mr Bharara said.

The Daily Caller comments:

Note that this possible jail time isn’t for creating the poster, but for lying to the court in a lawsuit he filed.

Not only is the story behind the Hope and Change poster a fitting metaphor for the Obama administration in general, but it is also a good example of what happens when objective standards of beauty are removed from the arts: artists mutate from talented craftsmen to brazen self-promoters.

 

P.S. An observation: AP made a stink about the copyright of their photograph being violated only after Obama was safely elected. I wonder if they would have extended the same courtesy to John McCain if his campaign had been as inept? Hmmm…