Seems legit. Especially considering there would certainly be no outrage whatsoever had this been a picture of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or some other liberal politician.
Does anyone remember Gabby Giffords ending up on a list of Democrats that Sarah Palin wanted to “target” in an upcoming election? All appeared on a map, their districts represented by a symbol that many viewed as crosshairs. Do you recall the demand for “civility” in our political dialogs that issued from the mouths and pens of liberals as high up as Barack Obama and as low down as Paul Krugman?
Maybe one of those liberals can rationalize the publication of an Associated Press photo that, as they say, needs no introduction:
From Breitbart:
Of course, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is a Republican.
That puts him in proximity with guns and gun posters … more often than Democrats.
Still, imagine a similar situation — a U.S. Senator campaigning for President — and instead of a pro-2nd Amendment event, it’s a pro-gun control event. Imagine this Senator is standing in front of a giant poster of a pistol — one meant to demonize the weapon rather than promote it.
Imagine that this same AP photographer, instead of shifting a foot to the left or the right, framed a picture with the Senator’s nose almost touching the barrel, as a closer crop makes clear.
Imagine that this photographer, even though he took a few shots with this silly setup, took many more without it. Imagine that his editor — unnamed and insulated from public backlash — chose not one but three of those photos to distribute to AP’s clients.
Here is the original, uncropped and unedited pre-publication photo that still has AP’s watermark:
It’s not a great photo either, to be perfectly truthful, but the AP has gone out of its way to make it immeasurably worse.
Cross-posted at the Mental Recession
