ActiCons

Ed Driscoll highlights an important theme here. (No, not just because he features ME!! in the video.) The increasing comfort that the unfailingly anti-American left feels in spreading political messages through any and all available media is disturbing.

Remember Pennsylvania State portraying vets as unstable idiots? And who can forget CNN’s Susan Roesgen trashing tea partiers? (Or all the other reporters trashing tea party protesters as “tea-baggers” and excusing themselves by absurdly claiming that THEY chose the derogatory term for themselves?) Let’s not even begin to discuss movies and television.

One can hardly avoid the conclusion that being on the left is becoming synonymous with being always on about the left – everything is politics, and politics is everything. The church of the left is vicious with those who lack devotion, and those who are devoted are nothing if not vigorous and unrelenting in their faith. A troubling cycle.

Somebody is lying.

This is an update to my previous story regarding the anti-American ads designed by Ogilvy & Mather. I mentioned in that article that History Channel parent A&E Television Networks has been issuing cease & desist letters to websites and others who were running the Ogilvy designed advertisements that featured the History Channel logo. This afternoon, I found one website which has already received a letter: MarkLives.com.

MarkLives received a cease and desist letter from AETN, parent company of The History Channel, demanding we remove advertising material for The History Channel from this site. For the record, the campaign in question was submitted by Multichoice agency Ogilvy Johannesburg, along with the information in the copy still below to MarkLives.com who published it in good faith.

The AETN letter read in part;

AETN is the owner of numerous trademarks associated with its History network, including the world famous marks THE HISTORY CHANNEL and the H logo (which are the subject of numerous trademark registrations worldwide).

Neither the use and display of AETN’s trademarks nor the purported advertisements themselves were authorized by AETN. As such, your display and hosting of this unauthorized content violates our rights under relevant law and constitutes, among other things, trademark infringement, dilution and tarnishment of our brands and marks, misrepresentation, interference with contract, and unfair business practices.

A&E is not taking this apparent abuse of their brand lightly, nor lying down. Please note the date of the original post at MarkLives is yesterday, presumably prior to my article at 9pm last night.

It also seems clear I’m not the only person who can’t get a response from Ogilvy.

Normally we would stand firm against such editorial interference. However, in an email to AETS, Ogilvy Johannesburg and MarkLives.com, Graham Pfuhl, Marketing and Sales Director at Multichoice, stated that the campaign in question was in fact rejected by Multichoice, and confirmed “no History Channel ads can be published without the prior authorization of AETN.”

Would an ad agency really go ahead and produce a campaign without some sort of authorisation? The point remains unclear as no official correspondence was received from Ogilvy Johannesburg at the time of publication.

That’s certainly the question, isn’t it? Multichoice is a major Cable/Satellite television provider. But the big news comes at the end of the article. MarkLives.com has posted the copy provided to them along with the ads, by Ogilvy Johannesburg:
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… or at least, by the ad agencies.

The History Channel is a generally well-respected brand in the United States. The shows routinely make “water-cooler” conversation at sites like Redstate. Indeed, the sister networks like The Military Channel are staples among conservative viewers, as anyone who spends any time around conservatives and veterans is well aware. So you can imagine my surprise reading an article earlier this week titled “Anti-American History Channel Ads You Won’t See In The US Or Online” at the Business Insider website. There were three images included which are, to say the least, inflammatory.

The campaign, titled “History is Written By The Winners” was represented by three images (History Channel logo has been removed):

Highly inflammatory, as well as disputable, and clearly anti-American. I immediately started looking into the story to find out why, or even if, the History Channel would actually run such vile ads, and why Ogilvy & Mather would create them. While I was researching, the story changed.

Less than a day after I read it, the article was updated with the following information:

Update: A rep for A&E Television, which owns HIstory Channel, says these are not authorized History Channel ads. This rep did not know if they were created by Ogilvy and Fran Luckin, as they were attributed on Adsoftheworld.com. We’ve updated the images with watermarks reflecting their inauthenticity.

Interesting. But a number of questions still remained. If A&E didn’t order the ads, who did? And why? Are they actually fakes?

Well … no. Not exactly.
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Teh Awesome (h/t Moe Lane)

(Thanks to @vermontaigne for the title)

I keep seeing people like Markos asking why Republicans are suddenly interested in who is responsible for “torture”. That the Speaker of the House just accused the CIA of lying to Congress goes right past them. No surprise. That the Speaker just can’t get her story straight, or even spit it out in complete sentences, doesn’t move them. Again, no surprise. That the enhanced interrogation techniques aren’t actually torture is a fact they’ll simply never consider, so deeply mired in Bush-hate partisanship are they. Do I need to say no surprise? Their very question is replete with presumed mischaracterizations.

So the next time someone asks why the Republicans “suddenly” care about “torture”, just say “Hey, why do Democrats suddenly not care about lying? … oh wait. Right.”

Hey, they’re consistent. Well, some of them are anyway, right Nancy?