So I don’t entirely know how I feel about this, but my gut feeling is that I don’t like it…
Just recently, Herman Cain “and his people” created this new website called Women for Cain! basically with the intent of trying to defuse all of the sexual harassment allegations that have surfaced from the honorable pizza tycoon’s past. I really have no desire to debate the audacity of the site itself because only in conservative politics does someone running for public office turn to calling his victims “losers and liars” instead of pretty much any other more sensitive response to hint that they’re just not true. Nonetheless, the real reason I wanted to write up this quick post was more along the lines of authenticity after a simple blog comment pointed out that the main logo for the website makes use of a stock image of happy women as opposed to actual happy women who are, in theory, in support of this potential pizza-touting pootie pirate.
See, here’s my problem – while I certainly understand that websites use stock images all the time to represent their customer service reps or random enthusiastic customers, I guess I’m kind of impartial to those because we all know that they look ridiculously fake, but I guess I’d just like to think that when you’re running for President of the United States and are trying to defend some pretty serious allegations against your character, it would actually be worth taking the next step to use imagery that suggested that your “strong base of female supporters” is a real group of people who actually exist!
Because if they don’t care enough for the logo to be actual Cain supporters, how am I supposed to know whether all of the letters below from his “loyal supporters” are actually real people, either? Sure, maybe all of these hard-working Americans for Cain just rose up on their own to fight back against the heathens who dared to sully their savor’s name with fabrications of love and lust … or maybe a handful of Cain staffers spent an afternoon sifting through Facebook photos in search of real red-blooded Americans to run alongside the supportive blurbs being cranked out by their staff writer counterparts.
In this digital age, what’s it take to even trust a simple testimonial anymore? Much less in the name of a politician?!