I can’t even begin to fathom the contempt dirty bertie seems to have for his constituents, let alone for the people he claims to lead.
The weekend before last, in the wake of the glorious ard fheis of soon-to-be-broken-hugely-expensive-promises, they launched their lovely little next steps campaign. Oops, did I put the wrong link up? Silly me.
I refuse to besmirch my blog with links to that nonsense. So if you want to know what I’m talking about you may need to go to bertie’s website and check out his new poster campaign, if, that is, you’ve managed to avoid it thus far.
For the purposes of the following dissection I will be referring primarily to the poster featuring bertie and four “bright young things” (read modelling hopefuls and/or wannabe ógra leaders - worse still, a combination of the two?). This is the one being used on the front page of the campaign website and the one I have been subjected to most often in my daily life over the last few days.
Bertie is pictured in the centre of the poster, laughing at his own joke. That’s the only possible explanation for that bizarrly contoured face, the combination of mirth and smug self-aggrandisement. Now, look into his eyes - a scary thought, I know, but bear with me. Look where his eyes are directed. Somewhere near the brown-haired girl’s left eyebrow. What’s so funny about that, bertie?
Now look at the photo again. Mr. Blueshirt on the left (how ironic is that?) isn’t laughing. In fact he’s straining to get out of the photo so he can get back to watching the soccer. Ms FutureChicklitAuthor is smiling like her agent told her to, looking somewhere on the back of bertie’s head for a downpayment of €50,000 on her first novel. The aforementioned brunette seems to have passed wind in her brand new suit and is mildly embarrassed but hoping nobody will notice, and the last fella looks like a 13 year old boy stuck at his first ‘mixed dishgo’.
I’ll be the first to admit that these assessments are based entirely on the appearance of these relatively innocent bystanders and they’re probably all decent people even if they have been duped into believing that appearing in a very bad ad with ‘him’ would be a positive thing. But here’s the crucial detail - the undeniable fact. None of these four young people are laughing at bertie’s joke. Now, i’m sure this is not the first time bertie cracked a joke and nobody laughed - in fact I would argue he’s been at that for a decade - but this is a special circumstance, because this was an organised photo-shoot, and these people were meant to laugh along with ‘him’.
Here’s where it gets really fun. Take one last look at the photo (and then consider washing your eyes out with carbolic soap). Look at where bertie’s suit edges in front of Ms. ChickLit 2011. Look at Dishgo boy, how the outline of his face falls against the brunette’s hair. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Have you ever used a software package called Photoshop??
Yes, it’s true. They couldn’t get four people to stand in a room with him. They couldn’t convince four presentable young things to share a joke with him. So they found four random yung’uns, and the photoshopped them, one by one, smiling and looking in all sorts of directions, around a photo of himself.
If you take a look at the rest of the posters, they’re all the same. Himself and two elderly folk, pensioners who no doubt he’ll pass a few extra euro to so they can spend it on grapes when they’re sitting on a trolley in a hospital somewhere because he can’t be bothered fixing the health service. Himself and a pair of young homeowners, gleeful at the prospect of being able to afford half a broom cupboard only 90 minutes from dublin on an island in the middle of a lake now that himself and his developer friends have decided not to help them out in the slightest. The list goes on. There’s even another version of the “young people” poster where Mr. Blueshirt has been magically removed, and better still brunette lady has been removed so that Dishgo Boy can get a bit closer to his apparent idol. Bertie may have plenty of friends, but it seems they all stayed in Manchester this week when he needed backup singers.
One last thought, and this to me is the best bit. All of these characters, these models, these FF enthusiasts, these poor eejits who can be seen on the back of buses (literally) all over the country - they at some point were called into a photographer’s studio, told to laugh and smile in a fairly bland way and sent packing with €50 in their back pocket. But bertie? He no doubt got a photography session all to himself. He got to stand, in his brand new suit with his brand new tie and his new haircut, in the middle of an empty photography studio, and he got to laugh at his own joke with nobody listening.
It’s a nice image, isn’t it?
