A funny thing happened the other day. Our friends at Talking Points Media, who are working with us on the soon to be launched Veracifier, posted a clip from a recent Bush Rose Garden speech on YouTube in order to support a blog post on TPMCafe. They were trying to make a specific point, that Bush seems to be continually asserting that public opinion is with him, and had clipped the part of the video they needed off C-Span with the audio of Bush’s lines.

But then, a few readers started noticing the long shot of Cheney standing dejectedly in the shrubs, absurdly far from the podium. Soon after, the video was everywhere. Picked up by The Huffington Post, Wonkette, even AOL News, TPM had accidentally unleashed a political video nearly as funny and odd as the MC Rove clip of the week before (OK, nothing’s that funny). The average TPM video gets between 1,000 and 10,000 views. This one, within three days, had gotten almost 250,000 views.

I hadn’t seen this until now, but just a day later, someone had already set the video to music: specifically, Radiohead’s “Creep,” to hilarious effect. It’s amazing how a video that seasoned eyes like Josh Marshall and Rachel Sklar missed the absurdity of the first time around had this much potential — but that’s the beauty of the Internet. Get enough eyeballs on something, and there’s a good chance that synapse will fire for the right person. And they’ll do something about it.

And without a doubt, that cameraperson who shot the long zoom deserves a raise.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 12:37 am and is filed under blogging, video, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.