Hillary's ad: debate footage doctored to make Obama blacker

In case you needed yet another reason to despise Hillary Clinton and her vermin strategists, she's now running an ad blatantly lying about Obama's subcommittee. Her ad includes debate footage heavily doctored to make Obama blacker.

I guess this is the "fun part."

This was all pointed out (and links provided, and so on) in a comment by converse, but I haven't seen it diaried yet, so I wrote this one. (Update: jthomascronin apparently diaried this story yesterday, and might be the original person to point this out.)

In another comment, clonecone pointed out that Time got caught doing this a while back and posted this picture:

Here's Hillary's take on it:

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I made this as a fancier version of the side-by-side graphic converse posted. My first thought when I saw the images was, Is this real? Converse provided the YouTube links to prove it:

Hillary's ad:

The actual debate footage (about 4:45 in):

In her ad, the colors are desaturated and the contrast is strongly increased to make Obama look much blacker. Poblano pointed out in the comments that they squished his face, too, and posted this image:

Make of that what you will. I think it's more likely to be incidental than the color changes: they squished it to fit in exactly one half of a wide screen. They could have just cropped it rather than distorting it, though, and they didn't.

I'm not accusing Hillary of technically being a racist. But she is cynically exploiting racism to further her personal ambition, and it's part of a pattern. She's doing it to a fellow Democrat who's virtually certain to be the nominee.

In the interest of fairness, I'll address a couple of the defenses for her that people have raised in the comments:

1. Some have suggested it's an innocent artifact of the video editing, color profiles and such. It's almost impossible for such artifacts to lead to such a striking difference from the original footage. There is no doubt the color and tonality were intentionally changed.

2. Others have suggested that darkening and desaturating the footage is normal for political attack ads trying to cast the target as sinister. That may be, but it's not an acceptable excuse. Even if you accept that as normal practice, it's still a dirty one, and it takes on a more charged meaning when you're using it to attack someone in your own party who's already fighting against a lot of racism in the false Muslim smears.

If nothing else, it would be great if Hillary were forced to defend this and say it's "standard operating procedure" to darken and desaturate footage in attack ads to make your opponent look sinister. Let her defend the details of the "fun part" in front of a camera. This is, at best, the worst of politics as usual.

Update: John Ararvosis of AmericaBlog took a closer look at debate footage from three different sources.:

I went and got the original footage from the Clinton ad, and then compared it to 3 different video clips of the same debate from 3 different sources. I did this so as to take into account any editing, or quality issues, that might have accounted for Obama having darker skin in any particular video. None of the 3 video sources I found showed Obama nearly as black as the Hillary ad does. Click the image above to see a larger version. Look at his lips. Look at his eyebrows. Look at how the red MSNBC background has turned more purple. Clearly the image was darkened. The question is "why."

The lie about the subcommittee

With all the attention to her race-baiting, people might overlook one other story here. She's blatantly lying about his subcommittee. Her ad says:

As chairman of the oversight committee charged with the force of fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan, he was too busy running for President to hold even one hearing.

That's a lie. Not one of these subcommittees is "charged with the force of fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan" (Hillary seems to have the Senate confused with the Army) but the one with the most direct jurisdiction would be the Subcommittee on Near East and South and Central Asian Affairs, which is chaired by John Kerry. Obama is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs.

Furthermore, Obama's subcommittee didn't meet frequently before he the chair, either. I can't find a record of their meetings online anywhere, but I vaguely remember hearing on the news when this "story" first broke months ago that the subcommittee had often gone years without meeting. If anyone can find that story, I'd love to put up a source. The subcommittee didn't meet much because most important issues relating to NATO have been handled by the full Foreign Relations Committee. Obama has been an active participant in the full committee.

In the comments, jdmorg points out a good analysis of this by David Corn at MotherJones, including this:

But the full foreign relations committee, under the guidance of Senator Joe Biden, has held several hearings on Afghanistan that covered NATO's role there. It's not as if the foreign relations committee did nothing on Afghanistan because Obama did not take on the mission. Also, as happens with many committees, the chair of the full committee reserves the right to handle the big issues him- or herself, and Afghanistan counts as a big issue.

Clinton ought to be careful about hurling stones in this area. As she always tells campaign crowds, she is a member of the Senate armed services committee. In February the committee held two hearings on Afghanistan. On February 8, it focused on appropriations for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was a witness. Eight days later, the committee zeroed in on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, holding a two-part hearing examining recent reports on Afghanistan. Key witnesses included senior officials from the State Department and the Pentagon responsible for the administration's Afghanistan policy.

Clinton attended neither of these hearings. She was on the campaign trail.

So don't let Hillary's race-baiting distract completely from the fact that she's a lying hypocrite. We have very diverse reasons to work hard against her. Rec this up to shine a light on Hillary's dirty tricks.