It’s no secret that bloggers save all kinds of images and use them when they need them. The most basic image to save is a silly photo of a politician, one that is so silly that it begs being used, or recycled. And Presidents are great — and fair -targets.
Silly or expressive photos of politicians are easy to collect, since few of them can stay in spin-perfect stances all the time. The politician today who has been caught in the most silly photos is undoubtedly Hillary Clinton. Just look at this montage.
Now that President Bush has said his farewells, it’s unlikely he’ll be in the news much between now and Tuesday’s inauguration. So it’s time to declare a silly photo amnesty on Bush (there are still cartoons being done by cartoonists and we run cartoons here).
And so, for posterity, here is a record of some of the photos that have been secretly hidden in TMV’s silly Bush file. Except for one, all are photos that floated around the Internet, and some appeared on various blogs over the past 8 years.
The Bush with cigarette photo is actually a photoshop given to TMV by a San Diego teenager, although there was never a post suitable to use it. There were times we ran serious and really good photos of Bush. Other times we didn’t.
But that’s not all:
But there’s more:
One of the most expressive images is this:
And, finally, there was this special image, sent to TMV by a loyal reader in Great Britain. It was used in November 2007 and November 2008:
But Obama should not be complacent. We’ve already started hoarding silly images of him and will save photos that are expressive but might not be the ones his press team would offer in his promo pack. And they do exist:
And cartoonists and photoshop fans are starting to have fun already, too:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.