Earlier this summer McCain gave a widely panned speech in front of a green background. Lime jello and cottage cheese became a running joke on the Interwebs.
Stephen Colbert issued the McCain Green Screen Challenge: Make McCain Interesting. A call to video editors everywhere to superimpose background images over the green screen and liven McCain up a bit…
Tuesday night (9/2/08) the winners were announced in this hilarious clip.
Take it from here Stephen…
(urghh – I can’t get the embed to work here.
I linked the image to his site if you want to watch it there. sorry!)
Imagine my shock when McCain’s speech last night starts off in front of a GREEN SCREEN! My husband and I said it almost simultaneously. Then I checked the live blog on DKos – and about 100 other people were typing the same thing.
The camera shot pulled back to show it was actually a picture of him standing in front of a lawn and some kind of building.One of his mansions? wtf?
h/t Atrios for the nice photoshop “Get off my lawns!”
TPM identified the building this morning. Some astute readers recognized this as the Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, CA. Leading Josh to speculate, hmmm did they mean to show Walter Reed Army Medical Center instead?
ABC News has picked up the story:
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos Reports: When John McCain began his acceptance speech last night, the staging was decidedly less grand than the sweeping stadium vista that the Obama campaign constructed at Invesco Field in Denver last week. And purposefully so. It was more intimate, with the candidate standing closer to his supporters, with a giant screen behind him.
A giant green screen. Or so it appeared to TV viewers for the first several minutes of the speech.
McCain has had trouble with green screens before, when internet mischief-makers used a green backdrop at one of his worst-received speeches of the year in June to superimpose other images behind — making for some popular YouTube spoof videos.
They also opined that the campaign got the wrong “Walter Reed” photo and stated that the McCain campaign is not saying what the significance of the photo is.
Wow! The incompetence of the McCain team is spectacular to behold at the same time it makes me want to barf. Just like lime jello.
UPDATE: This story gets weirder by the minute.
h/t TPM
The school principle issued a statment:
It has been brought to the school’s attention that a picture of the front of our school, Walter Reed Middle School, was used as a backdrop at the Republican National Convention. Permission to use the front of our school for the Republican National Convention was not given by our school nor is the use of our school’s picture an endorsement of any political party or view.
AND
h/t TPM again…
The same school was used as a backdrop for Matt Santos’ announcement of his presidential candidacy on the TV show The West Wing. Is that where they got the idea this looked Presidential somehow? bwahahaha!
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mmmmm
tasty or not?
NOT!
wonderful otb!
tds/tcr is the only tv i really miss…. yeah, i go see the tubes but…. that late-nite tv snark loses something (for me) being next-day lunch entertainment.
lovely catch!
tyvm
♥~
we can believe that McCain/ Palin would be far more incompetent than bush–and that’s a change that no one even thought would be possible.
LOL!
Thanks, OTB! Limey, slimey!
if they cannot show slides, how can you let them get near the red phone and the button? Waaaay to scary.
their staff did not confuse a medical center with a middle school!!!!!
When McCain offered his wife for the wet t-shirt beauty contest, I figured some new flunky on staff just didn’t do his advance work very well.
But this kind of consistent incompetence is just unbelievable. Could a McCain administration be even worse than George “heckuva job Brownie” Bush?
of the hanoi hilton.
Can’t have been a copyright problem though!
of course, it was a junior high then, not a middle school (circa 1966-1969). I was there when Reagan was elected governor of California. I was there when RFK and MLK were assassinated. It was during my years at Walter Reed that I had my first kiss, studied French, struggled with algebra, and first stripped for showers for PE.
The best of times, the worst of times.
Ah, thanks, J. McCain, for bringing these days back to me. Now… get the hell off my alma mater’s lawn!