Saturday, November 22, 2003

David Kirkpatrick makes a really dumb error in the Week in Review section of tomorrow's New York Times. Discussing the lurid U.K. cover of Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling (which is very different from the staid U.S. cover), Kirkpatrick writes:

the British book jacket bears caricatures of President Bush as Frankenstein-like and Vice President Dick Cheney with a Hitler mustache. A dark scrawl on the vice president's forehead reads, "Got Oil?"

Hitler mustache? That's ridiculous. The mustache is much too wide to be a Hitler mustache. And note the slogan -- "Got Oil?" That makes it obvious what the mustache is supposed to be: a "Got Milk?" mustache made of oil.

But wait -- does the "Got Milk?" ad campaign even appear in Britain? Well, it doesn't really matter. Kirkpatrick explains:

The cover images of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were borrowed from puppets carried by protesters outside the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002.

So the Cheney image is American. Therefore, it's an oil mustache -- case closed.

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