Say Anything Blog

Allegedly this screen capture from McCain’s latest campaign commercial is proof of a subliminal message the nefarious McCain advertising people put in to make people link Obama with al Qaeda.

Here’s the explanation from ABC News:

At the very beginning, the title—“The Obama Iraq Documentary”—flashes into place in a blaze of orange. And for a single frame—a tiny fraction of a second—Obama’s face is framed by the following prominent letters: “a l q D.”

Some caveats: “al qD” is meaningless by itself. The “l” is actually the capital “I” in “Iraq,” though in the typeface used in the video, it looks like a lowercase “L.” Other letters—at either end of the title—are simultaneously on the screen. And many editing programs do allow randomized letter placement.

But still. . . . For a brief moment, Obama’s face is framed by letters that the brain may want to play with and spell something that does make sense. If you type “al qD” into Google, you get this response: “Did you mean: al qaeda.”

Here’s the campaign ad played at full speed.

Stupid controversy ever?  You betcha.  But that won’t stop ABC News from using the hysteria over that now-infamous New Yorker cover to question why the McCain campaign let this “subliminal message” slip by them.

  A McCain aide told ABC that it was primarily put together by an editor who had about 48 hours to throw it together in advance of Obama’s foreign trip.

  Still, in this era of hyper-analysis — and in the very week that a non-subtle New Yorker cover was blasted as beyond the bounds of satire — should something like this have slipped by Team McCain?

Maybe it slipped by them because it’s just a random arrangement of letters that a) don’t even spell out al Qaeda direction and b) are on the screen for less than a second.

I guess that explanation makes too much sense or something.