On the other hand, it’s refreshing to see the sinister ugliness of John McCain’s politics and campaign portrayed so accurately in these portraits.

John McCain is one of the biggest frauds in the history of American politics, a fake maverick who long ago sold out his values to the “agents of intolerance” he so famously called out in 2000 while running against another ruthless schemer.

May sanity prevail this time.

The Atlantic Magazine’s art director and editor’s choice tells us a lot about what McCain has been through, it’s physical toll on him, and how that experience ( torture as a POW and suffering from malignant skin cancer) has shaped his thinking. By comparison Greenberg’s personal choice tells us nothing about him. It is simply a bad photo.

Why is her personal photo so weak? Weak direction on top of bad lighting. Compare it for example to Arnold Newman’s portrait of Alfred Krupp — http://tinyurl.com/krupp-newman — which was made basically the same way: in the last frames at the end of a longer portrait session, he had Herr Krupp lean slightly forward to get the ominous effect. ( Krupp had greatly increased his family’s fortunes by aligning himself with Hitler and his Nazi cronies and was a big time user of slave labor in his factories.)

Like Greenburg, Newman made his photo as an emotional response to the subject but it is propelled by Newman’s fierce intellect and intelligence while Greenberg’s personal photo is driven by a shallow and snarky cynicism (the same thing that drives the McCain and Palin campaign to repeat the same obviously obviously disprovable lie ( even GOP master strategist Karl Rove says ” “McCain has gone in his ads one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test,” and of course there is Palin’s continually deliberate mis-statements on the the infamous Bridge-to-Nowhere earmarks) repeatedly — they both Greenberg and McCain’s campaign think you are gullible enough to fall for the Big Lies.

Jill Greenburg thrives on generating controversy. The more McCain supporters gin this thing up, the more she’ll thrive.

Was what she did unprofessional? Sure, but not by making the photo she wanted to make, but in the way she has behaved afterwards.

We know about Newman’s manipulations but they weren’t public knowledge for years afterward. If Greenberg wanted her personal photo to be effective she should have just started circulating the photo without the brass ball clanking braggadocio.

But maybe that is the problem with blogs: you have to fill them up with something and you have to draw attention to their existence.