Avenging Angel? Or Gabriel?

Wonkette, the brilliant and prolific new entry that fills the political space in Nick Denton's Mall of Blogs, in between testing her pornographic vocabulary against the Bush campaign's "sloganator" (which I cannot make work with the Mozilla browser), mocks some of the photographs on the Bush web site. Of this one,

she comments, "After you fire the genius who came up with the Sloganator, you might call the photo editor in your office. [Bush] looks like the avenging angel of death, right? . . . Why do these people have jobs?"

A month ago, I mocked some Bush photographs too. In that case it was the illustrations in the Fiscal Year 2005 Budget of the United States of America. In the first budget that his administration prepared, Bush argued that the inclusion for the first time of "color and photographs" would enhance the "readability" of the document, and support the larger goal of "inaugurat[ing] an era of accountability in the conduct of the nation’s public business...[and] reporting to taxpayers on the relative effectiveness of the thousands of purposes on which their money is spent." I said in jest that the actual photographs in the Bush budget for FY 20005 made it seem more like the administration had decided to close the deficit by selling ad space in a trusted document to the reelection campaign.

But Wonkette's picture looked familiar. Yes, the budget photos and the campaign ads are exactly the same photos

This appeared in the section of the Federal budget entitled Upholding America's Values:

Caring for our seniors. President Bush meets with 94 year old Anna Tovcimak after a roundtable discussion on Medicare Liability Reform in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Is there anything illegal about this? Probably not. A picture of the President is a picture of the President, and maybe they think the Religious Right will see the Annunciation imagery here, although a 94-year-old is usually a poor candidate for a virgin birth.

But all humor aside, let's have no illusions: No President before Bush would even think of doing this. The budget is a statement of government. The campaign is the campaign. Budgets don't have pictures in them, much less campaign pictures. It just isn't done.

But the problem with this kind of thing is that, once done, there may be no turning back.