...or none at all.
People are making some hay about this photo of First Lady Michelle Obama
Now, as much as I like to bash her for her previously stated dislike for her lot in a wonderful life, and wearing expensive shoes to feed the homeless, and $100/lb steak at the White House...I can't bash her for this photograph.
Photos are but an instant in time. Sure they can reflect the emotion of a person, but they can just as easily be misleading. Emotions take moments, even seconds to express. Thus taking a sliver of that expression as it evolves can produce a snapshot of something entirely different.
Lets take a case in point... Do we really think that President Bush looks like this?
Of course not...these were but slivers in time during an emotional expression. But hey, the left sure did love to use them to advance their case that he was a dunce and a moron.
Now was the First Lady scowling at Carla Bruni...maybe...maybe not. We just don't know. (In fact if you ask me, based on the angles, I would say she is looking *behind* Bruni)
My ultimate point is, there will be plenty of fodder for which to criticize the hypocritical First Lady, but lets not start the meme that an alleged scowl proves that she is a mean bitch. To do so would be no better than how the left treated Bush....and we need to remind ourselves that we are better than them....
UPDATE: Thanks again to Instapundit for the Instalanche! I have also fixed the bad picture. One drawback to a job where you can't read 'blogspot' sites or access Blogger...I didn't know it was an issue until I got home tonight. For the same reason, I haven't read the comments yet....
UPDATE II: Well I certainly am getting beat up in the comments... But if you think I am soft on Obama, look around the rest of the blog and decide for yourself.
In the end, I don't necessarily disagree that she might be a shrew, or a cold-hearted bitch, or whatever else. But I was simply stating that based on my photographic experience, this picture doesn't "prove" any of that, no more than Bush's funny faces "proved" he was allegedly an idiot. If you want to spotlight the arrogance of the First Lady, use her words against her. There are certainly plenty of those to go around.
But ultimately I think there are plenty of bigger issues to go after besides discerning the temperament of the First Lady.
UPDATE III: Now almost 2 years since I published this post, I noticed that the Yahoo News image of Mrs Obama and Carla Bruni that I originally used was blank. A search of Yanhoo News images for "Obama + Bruni" now gets ZERO his. So it appears that someone put that official image down the memory hole. Thank goodness for the internet....there are plenty of other copies out there....
