A little more on photo fakery (which I admire and indulge in occasionally with enough clumsiness to make certain that the phoniness is obvious). Ken Light, the photographer who took the original John Kerry photo that was recently merged into an image with Hanoi Jane to titillate rightwing cretins with Internet access, has some words to say about truth and photography in the OpEd section of today’s Washington Post. These are a few:
I've spent a lot of time answering questions about this in the past couple of weeks, and this time, as far as I can tell, the Internet has come as close as it gets to a correction. If you use a search engine to look for my Kerry picture now, you'll find the hoax explanations before you see the photo itself. So what do I do now about the conspiratorial Web site that's trying to convince its readers that my original picture was the hoax -- that Fonda really was at that podium with Kerry, and somebody edited "Hanoi Jane" out? All I can do is pull Roll 68 out of the file cabinet again. It's my visual record, my unretouched truth.
Of course there are “some people” who are not interested in the truth. We used to call them “fucking liars,” but in these politically correct days they prefer to be called Republicans. They are not that either, I’ve been a Republican and know they stand for nothing that the party birthed by Lincoln and brought to maturity by Eisenhower did. These people believe that “the truth” is fungible, that it is whatever you can get away with, whatever you can dupe enough people into believing just long enough to maintain electoral dominance.
Neither are they “conservative.” Barry Goldwater was a conservative and, grudgingly, so was Ronald Wilson Reagan. No, the people who slime Kerry and Cleland truly are just fucking liars. They know you can’t run for office under that banner so they grab the nearest most convenient label and hide behind it, like a frightened child beneath a mother’s skirt. All they care about is power and control. They have no interest in the truth. It is only an inconvenient obstacle between them and the total domination they crave. They need to obscure the truth because, if enough people ever really saw the real truth, they would be spiraling up the mountainside, like the villagers in Frankenstein, carrying torches and prepared to inflict involuntary immolation on these fucking liars. The truth is their mortal enemy.
7:45:05 AM 
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