Also known as the "Spin Until Your Wheels are Smoking" Department.
And reporters wonder why everyone thinks they're a joke. Maybe it's because of things like this.
U.S. SEN. Barack Obama's critics have called his presidential campaign a cult of personality.
His glassy-eyed supporters are enraptured. The media are docile. Hollywood stars make music videos about him.
"There is something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism," Joe Klein of Time magazine has observed.
But we ask you, does the campaign poster on this page remind you of a totalitarian cult?
Wait, don't answer that.
The Soviet-style heroic Obama, the use of a single word "Hope," do make the SEPTA bus shelter posters a bit reminiscent of George Orwell's "1984."
Its more direct antecedent is John Carpenter's 1988 paranoid totalitarian fantasy flick, "They Live." Replace the word "Hope" with "Obey" on that Obama poster and tell us what you think.
Anyone who starts off quoting Joe Klein on Obama is missing a few screws anyway. But by all means, let's buy into the "cult" mantra -- but don't mention the billboards in the South with Bush's picture and the caption "Our Leader."
And Gar Joseph, who wrote the column, obviously doesn't know squat about Soviet art.
Via Will Bunch at Attytood.
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