Fake Sarah Palin Photo and Needless Mischief

September 3, 4:32 PMPolitical Issues ExaminerJudah Freed

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Faked photo of Sarah Palin and original 2004 photo from "Doctor Casino" on Flickr.

Adobe Photoshop is a wonderful tool for the publishing industry. The software lets designers resize photos at any given resolution and render them into a variety of file formats. In the hands of political mischief makers, however, PhotoShop and other image manipulation tools become dangerous instruments of propaganda.

A case in point is the faked image of gun-toting Sarah Palin now circulating on the Internet.

As you can tell by the side-by-side comparison above, Sarah Palin's head was carefully overlaid on the neck of another young woman.

The images was stolen from the Flickr photostream of young "Doctor Casino," who's generously given permission to reproduce his original image here. "I took this photograph somewhere to the east of Athens, GA, in late Spring/early Summer of 2004,"  he reports on his Flickr page.

I have not been able to track down the creator of the faked photo. The earliest appearance found by Doctor Casino is at an Imageshack.us website, which was topped by an ad for Barack Obama. (Subsequent visits have shown ads for automobiles above the image , so I cannot really say anything certain about who is behind the photo or the posting.)

I'm displaying these two humorous images side-by-side to make a serious point about political dirty tricks.

Doctor Casino himself names the nemesis involved. Such images influence the social "meme," that is, the socially accepted thoughts or attitudes passed from one person to another.

In this case, the meme being communicated sexualizes and minimizes Sarah Palin as a gun-toting babe in an American flag bikini. The intention of the photo thief is to make the GOP vice presidential nominee into a laughing stock holding a rifle stock.

I love a good joke as much as the next fellow, and I smiled in amusement when I first saw the obviously faked photo. Upon reflection, however, I realized that such dirty tricks are not funny. Actually, I believe these predatory tactics endanger the political process by bypassing intelligent discourse.

And the irony here is that such mean meme tricks are not necessary.

Regardless of the positive spin being put on her nomination by Republican Party spokepersons during the GOP convention this week, anyone with a trace of logic and common sense can conclude after minimal research that Sarah Palin clearly is unqualified for the office of vice-president or president. (See my earlier posting about the Alaskan woman who's known Palin for years.) Palin's lack of gravitas for top national leadership calls into question the judgment of John McCain, who chose his running mate after only one personal meeting.

Given the political realities at hand, my suggestion to the mischief makers is to knock it off.  You do more harm than good by unfairly messing with the social meme. Let the facts speak for themselves.