This is brilliant.
(Do you think enough voters still remember the old wolves ads?)
There are plenty of big-name pundits who have no more memory than a cat. But I take your point.
You want to start a whip-round for air-time? I'll chip in.
The one I want to see is one in which you see a series of shots of individual Dems, prominent and not, with particular emphasis on vets, looking into the camera and saying, "Say it to my face, Karl." In my dream world, the next time Rove goes on about Dems being in league with the terrorists, or being weak on terrorism, we play that widely. In my super-dream world, Karl tries to call our bluff and does say it to someone, and that Dem decks him.
Ooo. I like that one. But mostly for the 'Punching Rove' aspect.
You wouldn't even need to use a caricature in LB's ad. You just run a bit of the Republican Wolves ad, then a clips of officials touting the latest major terror bust, then headlines like "terror charges dropped," "more aspirational than operational...."
Anyway, airtime isn't the way to go. If you have an ad idea, someone in your circle of friends will know someone who could make an ad that you could put on the web. If it's any good, it'll be widely distributed in a week.
If you really want to monger fear, you need to have a closing shot of the whiny kid screaming and pointing forward, while a wolf swallows him from behind.
I recently spoke with a friend who thought the Democrats should be wittier and funnier in their ads. We came up with an ad idea, inspired by this Onion article:
Scene: James Brown (is he liberal?) at a podium as president, taking questions from the press.
Reporter: Mr. President, when are we gonna get down in Iraq?
James Brown: When the Iraqi people get up, then we gonna get down!
***
Of course, this could backfire and badly.
I remember James Brown as a Nixon supporter. Anybody else remember Funky President?
6:I have no RL friends. Anyone want to make this one? The idea is now open source.
And I like your version, but I'd want the story as a voiceover. [Black Screen] "Once there was a boy who was left guarding the sheep." [WMD Speeches]. "Wanting to make himself sound important, he cried out 'Wolf, wolf'." [No WMD in Iraq headlines]. "When the villagers came, they found no wolf there." [Terror plot stories] "He did the same thing again." [Terror plot not actually a big deal headlines] "And the villagers decided they would never listen to his warnings again." [Bush Wolf ad] "It's a dangerous world. But leaders who can't separate reality from fantasy can't keep us safe in it, no matter how loudly they sound the alarm."
Right. Which means lots and lots and lots of coverage of the ads as "news." LB, you're a clever one.
(But we need to not make it about Bush: we need to make it about the Republicans as a party.)
Doesn't your husband have any friends, LB?
"Doesn't your husband have any friends, LB?"
Another commercial screaming to get made.
Does anybody know: how hard is it to make these ads for the web? Tom?
I'm told iMovie is very easy to use, but I've never opened the application.
Using iMovie is not the hard part, the hard part is getting the raw footage or generating the elements of animation you'd like to use. That's actual work.
you can't start with the scary image. it just reinforces the emotional idea. you have to bring up the idea of it, but in such a way its completely laughable. you have to get the emotion of funny, not fear. so, start out with a couple of bush's frat bros in halloween 'wolf' costumes, holding budlites, fucking around with him. then cut to the vids of him making scaremongering claims from state of union speeches or whatever.
Actually, I think it would be totally cool to arrange with MAD mag to use Alfred E. Newman's likeness as the boy who cried wolf.
The message would be clear.
R
The Alfred E. Newman image pre-dates mad magazine.
The most fun part would be casting the kid, I think. You'd have to find a good mix of whininess, entitlement, and barely suppressed violence, without being so obvious as to cast Draco Malfoy.
Not W. You need some "type" that screams "Republican."
Perhaps while everyone who wants to cross the field is scanned for sheep pheremones an obviously fragile tree can fall on several innocent bystanders.
This is the most motherfucking brilliant idea for a political ad I have seen in years. Please don't let it slip away! If no one has the tools + time to make it happen among us, we should at least write it up for email to MoveOn & so forth, or just drop it into the Kosphere & see what they can do.
In a similar vein, there's this Olbermann clip:*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30ligvuLKCs
* I know nothing about the guy other than this clip -- which hammers home the politicisation of terror alerts.
Olbermann's "Countdown" is about the best thing going on cable news--which I realize is like being the best mezzo-soprano on the Philadelphia Eagles... but it's nice to see something generally watchable on MSNBC. Could be lots better; but Olbermann has a wry attitude and a taste for weird news (generally a day or so behind FARK), and his open feud with Bill O'Reilly has been quite entertaining (especially since he's succeeded in administering regular smackdowns while holding the moral and professional high ground).
Olbermann's apparently a bit left of center; not quite Air America, but definitely outside the herd. His piece on politiciztion of terror alerts has run twice now, and I like that he's not afraid to stick with a story. I wish the suits would give him a couple hard-news correspondents and let him actually feature more original reporting. He ends up covering a lot more TV drivel than is good for him (or me), and his outspoken surliness about "another story my producers are forcing me to cover" doesn't help when the show runs with, say, TomKat for two segments in a row.
Anyhow I catch the show once or twice a week, and it's about the only TV news I can stand anymore. Also I believe the show's ratings have improved sharply over the past year, while O'Reilly's are slumping...
18: The good thing about the ad as described in 10 is that it's all still shots of headlines, aside from the final bit that can be stolen from the Bush ad. I've never used iMovie, but assuming that we have a mike somewhere around the house for the voiceover, I could probably do this with a fair amount of time and cursing. (Where would I get the headlines? Okay, that's a problem. Websearch for stories, and then reformat attractively to look like generic newspapers? (with little footnotes for the real sources?))
But I was kinda hoping someone would volunteer as "Heck, I could do that in an hour and a half. Email me."
something that makes him look like Bush or a Republican somehow
Would a red riding hood be too obvious?
