John McCain on Facebook: Young, Slim, Trim, and Not Likely to be Him

By Lee Russ

Saturday, July 26, 2008 at 07:25 PM

You can call this trivial and nitpicking if you want, but....the "John McCain isn't old" campaign seems to be in full swing, in that barely competent McCain campaign way. BuzzFlash has a "what's your caption" piecebased on John McCain's Facebook picture showing a tall slender John McCain. It's so obviously off that I felt compelled to check to make sure the photo really is from McCain's Facebook page; it is.

How ridiculously desperate and lacking in even basic integrity do you have to be to use a substantially distorted picture on Facebook when you're the presidential nominee of one of the two major parties? Really?

One of two things happened to produce this picture:

• That's McCain's head from several years ago cropped onto someone else's body
• They took an actual McCain photo and increased the vertical dimension while keeping the horizontal dimension the same.

My money's on the second option. You can do this with a program as basic as Microsoft Pain, or with the most advanced version of Photoshop.

So I guess the McCain campaign thinking is that the youth of the nation who stumble on McCain's Facebook page will now be deceived into thinking that McCain is slimmer than he is, taller than he is, and younger than he is, which will make them think that he's "cooler" than he is, and more in tune with the youth of America than he is.

Kind of makes me wonder why, since the pic is so obviously not John McCain as he really is. Are they afraid that the electronic voting fix isn't going to work this time, now that the Ohio election lawsuit seems to be kicking back to life with a nice solid Republican now questioning the validity of that election?

If so, this 21st century political story is the classic good news-bad news joke. The bad news is that the McCain campaign thinks that younger voters have IQs in the single digits. But the good news is that we're getting closer to controlling electronic voting fraud.

ps. Even the picture on the home page of McCain's Facebook account looks retouched to me. It's only a head shot, but McCain's very noticeable real life jowls seem to have been sliced away, as have the neck wrinkles and hanging skin. Compare that pic to this one, from February, 2008, showing McCain from the same perspective Do they look just a little different? If I'm right, at least they had to work a little harder to alter this picture. Unless they just used an old one.