John McCain’s Republican challenger in Arizona, a woman named Kelli Ward, has long believed in a federal plot to poison Americans with the chemical trails some aircraft leave in the air.
Yet Ward’s keen sense of the endurance of certain visual effects fails to extend to the traces old attack ads leave in the mediasphere. Maybe Ward thought Mitt Romney’s 2008 attack ads against McCain had vanished into the Celestial Contrail and become fair game… Whatever her motives, her campaign simply, er, repurposed them…?
Kelli Ward, one of U.S. Sen. John McCain’s three Republican primary challengers, may have found a way to overcome her campaign-funding struggles: just tack her name at the end of an old Mitt Romney attack ad against McCain from the 2008 presidential race.
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Stealing and signing with your own name is a gesture quintessentially postmodern, an instance of Appropriation Art, in which artists like Sherrie Levine re-photograph canonical early twentieth century photographs and sign them with their own name. But just as Sherrie had to deal with a bit of copyright static, so Kelli is in receipt of legal correspondence from a Romney rep. Something about “blatant infringement” of “protected work”…?
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“How could anyone do anything so dumb?” asked Mr UD this morning when I told him about it. “Didn’t she know she’d be caught?”
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Without wanting to get too conspiratorial (in this UD defers to Ward and her man Donald Trump), UD will point out that if you reshuffle the letters in KELLI WARD you get (roughly)
LIKED RAWLS.
I.e., Ward is a secret John Rawls lover. John Rawls! The famous left-liberal political philosopher! Could Ward’s inner struggle between right and left account for her otherwise unaccountable behavior?
July 15th, 2016 at 5:29PM
seems fitting somehow as the Mitt used to strip companies of their valuable parts and then try to resell the left-overs to the whatever suckers might buy in,we’ll see if it costs her with the electorate there, discriminating bunch that they are.
July 15th, 2016 at 7:55PM
dmf-your Mitt mention had me thinking of the local steel mill that was bought by an investor in the 1970s. The mill bought raw material and sent the bill to accounts payable at HQ. AP complained: “Why are you buying Coke? We own Royal Crown Cola?”
The product was coke–processed coal. The investor wasn’t really interest in steel, but, reportedly, the generously funded pension plan that had been drained by the time the company filed bankruptcy in 1989.
July 16th, 2016 at 12:54PM
JOH, yeah brutal there is a term vulture capitalism for the folks that cash in on disasters (including man-made ones) like is now happening in Puerto Rico but really the phrase has become a bit redundant in our times.
July 16th, 2016 at 6:12PM
I’m not even sure today’s capitalists are interested in capital. A commentor on another site, a self-described former Fortune 500 director, said he was snookered by a management that wanted to bust wages and salaries. The idea, he surmised, was to redeploy savings into more productive areas.
Bullpuckey. What happened was management gorged itself on bonuses, golden parachutes, etc., and after a few years the plant and equipment were sold to a Chinese firm. It was a hustle all along.
July 17th, 2016 at 8:41PM
One follow-up micro-rant. Sales work is completely shot as a line of work. The typical corporate pattern is to hire strong closers to build up a territory or clientele, let them live in a fool’s paradise for a while, then dump them for a $10 an hour customer service kid working a phone from a script.
I bought into that Chamber of Commerce rubbish when younger. Y’know, that bellyaching about not being able to find good people, why won’t people commit to a career, etc. I’m a high-commitment type, so I learned the hard way how foolish my attitude was.