Mission unAccomplished

November 7, 2006 1:39 AM

Mission Accomplished whitehouse 1.5.03 reporting bb doubleplusungood refs unevent antefilling

Bush Administration pays tribute to Eric Blair:

Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.

posted by orthogonality (40 comments total)

GOTV. That's the antidote for this crap. Get Out The Vote.

To quote a different English author, "This day is called the feast of Crispian:/.../Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,/ But he'll remember with advantages/ What feats he did that day."
posted by orthogonality at 1:49 AM on November 7, 2006

As Napoleon observed, l'historie est une suite de mensonges sur lesquels on est d'accord."
posted by three blind mice at 1:58 AM on November 7, 2006

Or, translated, "History is a sofa of small birds who agree with lesbians."

Wise words. Even today.
posted by Jofus at 2:01 AM on November 7, 2006 [8 favorites]

"History is a sofa of small birds who agree with lesbians."

Well it is!
posted by Jimbob at 2:03 AM on November 7, 2006

OMG!!! Teh White House is altering the very fabric of space/time!

Run!! Run for the hills before they erase them too!!!
posted by Dagobert at 2:09 AM on November 7, 2006

orthogonality writes "That's the antidote for this crap."

But what's the antidote for the too-smart-for-plain-english posts? Yes, yes, I'm sure the contents of whatever it is you linked reflects your cute obliqueness but why don't you just describe it without dickwadding about. *calls bricklayer gang, erects fortification against potential attacks*
posted by peacay at 2:10 AM on November 7, 2006

peacay writes "But what's the antidote for the too-smart-for-plain-english posts? Yes, yes, I'm sure the contents of whatever it is you linked reflects your cute obliqueness but why don't you just describe it without dickwadding about. "


Sorry, I figured most mefites had read or at least heard of George Orwell's 1984.
posted by orthogonality at 2:13 AM on November 7, 2006

I'm new here but I already know how to click links before commenting on them. And 1984 is still a damned good read.

That said, it looks to me like the White House thoughtfully pre-accomodated the news channels' scrolling text with a black matte. I'm too excited to vote tomorrow (today?) to be super-upset about this.
posted by mistermoore at 2:19 AM on November 7, 2006

MetaFilter: A Sofa Of Small Birds Who Agree With Lesbians
posted by scodger at 2:27 AM on November 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

I expect this thread to go well.......
well away very fast when the admins wake up.
Really ortho though I agree with your sentiments this is noise.
posted by adamvasco at 2:27 AM on November 7, 2006

But what's the antidote for the too-smart-for-plain-english posts? Yes, yes, I'm sure the contents of whatever it is you linked reflects your cute obliqueness but why don't you just describe it without dickwadding about.

peacay: To wit, I believe Mr. Ortho's missive here impugns the integrity of... of... oh hell... using taxpayers time and equipment ot play on editten video is America worst nite mare!!!!

why you not condone peacay. i mint condamn!^
posted by hal9k at 3:26 AM on November 7, 2006

Really ortho though I agree with your sentiments this is noise.

Really? Catching the U.S. Government in a bald faced lie using the internet, youtube no less, is noise? The comments are mostly noise and FPP is a bit silly but the link itself is fascinating. It's like Moore's Law is now being applied to Western historical amnesia even though there is a clear and damning evidence trail. We no longer repeat the mistakes of history. We repeat the mistakes of last week. Deliberately.

The emperor is not only naked but his cock is jammed in your eye socket and fucking your skull.
posted by srboisvert at 3:36 AM on November 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

Someone at reddit suggests otherwise:

This is also why people should downvote this hoax. The video is not doctored! The proof: Washington Post's video (direct link to the .ram file). It is the exact same video, only difference is that you can see the microphone instead of the black bar. I know it is the exactly the same since it pans and zooms at exactly the same points, and has the exact same perspective.

We don't have to make stuff up. There are enough real things to focus on and be outraged about.

It certainly looks like the video simply has a bar over the mic stand (presumably for widescreen transmission?). I think you need comparision footage before you can really claim this is doctored. I'm no fan of political revisionism making unevents, but you got to get this stuff right.
posted by MetaMonkey at 3:40 AM on November 7, 2006

wow.... that's just sloppy editing. good find.
posted by trinarian at 3:42 AM on November 7, 2006

This is one reason why I stopped reading Metafilter. (Another is too many posts per day.) (I stopped by here looking for strange maps.)

* It's only very slightly interesting (oh jeez, the White House site makes an effort to put the president in a good light, airbrushing possibly problematic aspects of the story).

* It's about politics, and partisan, which raises my blood pressure.

* It produces a lot of useless verbiage, this comment included.

Just wanted to share my knee-jerk indignation of the moment, since this seems to be the place for it.

No offense intended to orthogonality and my fellow MeFites, whom I appreciate and occasionally miss. Politics happens.

Think, hesitate, pause, walk away... Oh heck, post.
posted by Turtle at 3:56 AM on November 7, 2006

Actually, going through the archives, it looks like every video from 2003 has that same black bar.
posted by EarBucket at 3:59 AM on November 7, 2006

Briought to you by the Ministry of Information.
posted by caddis at 4:15 AM on November 7, 2006

Actually, going through the archives, it looks like every video from 2003 has that same black bar.

I knew something was fishy when they didn't show an actual "before" video for comparison. It's imagining this kind of bullshit that lets them get away with real crimes.
posted by cillit bang at 4:26 AM on November 7, 2006

The black bar may be hiding the void or content that supposed to be filled by new channel idents and the irritating scrolling news crap. And I second the feeling behind the reddit comment.

Go get out the vote, stop hanging around here.
posted by gsb at 4:49 AM on November 7, 2006

why don't you just describe it

Because if he described it, it would go something like this:

A brief video clip of a snarky young guy making an elaborate production out of showing you that the video clip on the White House's website of the President's famous speech from May 2003 doesn't show the Mission Accomplished banner above his head. No, it doesn't alter his words or, in fact, anything, but it doesn't show the banner! We're headed for totalitarian doom! Oh, and there's a black band across the bottom.

And then you might have asked yourself, "Do I really need to see this?"

Actually, going through the archives, it looks like every video from 2003 has that same black bar.

Which pretty much eliminates any point this whole exercise might have had. Oh well. Next!
posted by languagehat at 5:28 AM on November 7, 2006

Well now that we've settled that. On to more serious matters...
posted by furtive at 5:38 AM on November 7, 2006

The Communists removed people from photo's who had been killed. Nikolai Yezhov, the young man strolling with Stalin to his left, was executed in 1940.. In the edited version Communist Party censors edited the photo, removing Nikolai from (but ironically placing him into) history..

In scholarly circles this is known as Negationism, or more commonly, historical revisionism.
posted by stbalbach at 5:48 AM on November 7, 2006

You know who else eliminated people from pictures?

...Oh, wait, nobody was eliminated from this picture. No history was changed in any way. But hell, it's fun to talk about historical revisionism.
posted by languagehat at 6:11 AM on November 7, 2006

MetaFilter: This is why I stopped reading MetaFilter.
posted by Floydd at 6:19 AM on November 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

...Oh, wait, nobody was eliminated from this picture

That's one possibility. The other is that Skynet, under Opus Dei's guidance, successfully infiltrated the net as a whole and altered all of the copies of that video. The next step, once it takes control of Xenu's battery of mind-control lasers orbiting the Moon, will be to redact the offending portions of your memory.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:30 AM on November 7, 2006

I was working on a video project a month ago where I needed this footage, and the RM version on their website did not feature this frame shift. I ended up getting the Fox feed from a fellow YouTuber, it was identical to all the other network coverage and used this same camera position for the entire speech.

However, that's pretty much a moot point because you only see the banner when he is walking to the podium and the camera is panning across all the service members on deck. There's only a few quick shots of it from network perspectives, afaik it was never consistently captured in the upper frame region during the speech if at all. Also, it wouldn't make sense for them to filter out news branding or a ticker because they wouldn't have superimposed that over their own feed at any point in time for any reason.

So yeah, although I agree it's kind of strange, it's clearly nowhere near what the author of the video piece suggests. When you take all this into account it's entirely disingenuous of him to move that video player window and reveal the press shot with the banner as if it was framed in that exact fashion. Weaksauce.

Catching the U.S. Government in a bald faced lie using the internet, youtube no less, is noise?

Technically they use shitty RealMedia streams, which is far more offensive to mankind at any rate.
posted by prostyle at 6:32 AM on November 7, 2006

now if only they could put a black bar over that mountain of corpses
posted by matteo at 6:41 AM on November 7, 2006

Turtle writes "This is one reason why I stopped reading Metafilter."

Well obviously you didn't!
posted by clevershark at 6:50 AM on November 7, 2006

I don't know the specifics of this (I never bothered watching the WH-hosted video before, I am violently allergic to your President's voice) but it does look funny to see a black bar seemingly-amateurishly put at the bottom of the video... it IS oddly reminescent of those parts of 1984 (at least in the John Hurt movie) where Winston just puts black tape over the face of people who are deemed to have fallen out of favor with the authorities.

Now, there might well be a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, but it *looks* like someone edited in the black tape to cover up something now considered inconvenient.
posted by clevershark at 6:55 AM on November 7, 2006

"You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut."
posted by smackfu at 7:07 AM on November 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

The black bar is covering his enormous erection.

You know it's true, you saw the flight suit.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:24 AM on November 7, 2006

What a fuckin' crap post. The minutia of Bush campaign lit revisions as a single blog post and Orwell riff? Can't you be out driving people to polls or something?
posted by klangklangston at 7:29 AM on November 7, 2006

You know, I think this kind of thing deserves to be noted, but it really doesn't deserve the hyperbole that's being thrown around.
posted by Stauf at 8:34 AM on November 7, 2006

Really? Catching the U.S. Government in a bald faced lie using the internet, youtube no less, is noise? The comments are mostly noise and FPP is a bit silly but the link itself is fascinating. It's like Moore's Law is now being applied to Western historical amnesia even though there is a clear and damning evidence trail. We no longer repeat the mistakes of history. We repeat the mistakes of last week. Deliberately.

Or not.
posted by srboisvert at 8:40 AM on November 7, 2006

That's one possibility. The other is that Skynet, under Opus Dei's guidance, successfully infiltrated the net as a whole and altered all of the copies of that video.

You know what, Stuart, I like you. You're not like the other people here in the trailer park.
posted by gompa at 9:00 AM on November 7, 2006

That's one possibility. The other is that Skynet, under Opus Dei's guidance, successfully infiltrated the net as a whole and altered all of the copies of that video.

Naw, it wasn't Opus Dei. It is the Jesuits. With Illumaniti and Masonic backing.
posted by rough ashlar at 9:16 AM on November 7, 2006

I saw this over at reddit before I saw it here. There and here, the question of why the video was altered is discussed. But there, as here, no defender of the Administration has stood up to say anything like "We all know the Bush Administration would never stoop to such a tactic." And I find that kind of telling.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:31 AM on November 7, 2006

smackfu, the point is not that they did or did not alter the film. The point is that er know they’re the kind of people who would alter the film, whether the actual film was altered or not. And knowing that is half the battle. G.I. Joooooooooe!

Metafilter: It produces a lot of useless verbiage, this comment included
posted by Smedleyman at 9:35 AM on November 7, 2006

could it be that the video was shot in widescreen and the internet format is standard, so they added a black bar on the bottom instead of the more familiar black bars on the top and bottom?

not that I find it hard to believe that the whitehouse would doctor things in this manner, but the angle of that shot is different than the popular 'mission accomplished' image we see so much of.

if other people have seen the same footage from other sources and it has the same bar, my bet is its just a 16:9 -> 4:3 video conversion thing and not some insidious scheme.
posted by crunchywelch at 9:37 AM on November 7, 2006

"Get out the vote" is all well and good, as long as everyone plays by the rules, but the fact is that the GOP has spent the last three elections refining the art of stealing elections. I hate to say that I am not optimistic today.
posted by wsg at 9:45 AM on November 7, 2006