Toughguys Wear Tails

How silly is the current silly season in political images? Yesterday, my local daily and The New York Times both featured page-one, multi-pic spreads showing President Bush's locked door slapstick in the People's Republic of China—a fairly funny incident that got about 10,000 times as much attention as it deserved. Today asses are frosted because of a buy-popcorn-now message allegedly sneaked into a clip of Vice President Cheney.

Meanwhile, nobody seems to have noticed one of the unhappiest political images of the twenty-first century: Last week Cheney chose to make his opening salvo against the Democratic traitors during a speech at the Americans For Tax Reform Ronald Reagan Gala—while standing at a podium wearing evening clothes. Whose brilliant idea was it to have the most hated person in the White House talk about standing firm in Iraq while he's looking like Edward Arnold playing the villain in a Frank Capra movie?

I don't care about the content of the argument; it's the image that's fascinating. Is this more evidence of the Machiavellian public relations genius of Karl Rove? Didn't they have maybe a big round bag with a dollar sign on it the veep could have held while he was telling us all to toughen up? And since Cheney has obviously just hatched some deliciously diabolical scheme against Jimmy Stewart, maybe he'll be feeling expansive enough to answer my biggest question: What kind of age of irony are we living in, where an image audiences would have howled at in 1937 passes without notice?