Be careful with bookcases and windowpanes.

Where I work, one of the things I’m (partially) responsible for is the production of our organization’s publications. If the cover of our organization’s annual report had any sort of religious symbol displayed that prominently on it, intentional or not, I think it is safe to say that it is at least possible I would be fired. Even if it was unintentional, it certainly registers as a horribly egregious oversight, again, the likes of which people can, and are, fired over.

Hey, who remembers the penis on the Little Mermaid VHS cover?

That story is just an amalgam of an AP ad-analysis (the first paragraph) and the Byron York story in NRO. It contains the line about how he “found himself” just happening to make a lil’ ol’ Jesus speech while the cameras just happened to be rolling.

Interestingly, the AP paragraph is the only version I’ve seen so far that corrects his ungrammatical first sentence (“Are you about worn out of [sic] all the television commercials you’ve been seeing . . .”), or even (implicitly) notices it. Usually that kind of stuff gets mentioned. Huckabee’s such a rube you can’t even get down to the level of his command of English.

It’s pretty obvious that the individual word choice was the only part not pre-planned.

(Full disclosure: I can’t actually stomach listening to some God-thumping blow-hard tell me that his filogenocidal sky daddy is the reason some death cult stole the solstice celebration; I haven’t actually watched the ad being discussed.)

That’s completely plausible; YouTube sacrifices a huge amount of quality to its compression, even compared to the paucity that is TV. Also, gamma is all kinds of funky.

I’m quite happy to believe that it wasn’t meant to pop out quite so much. Then again, I have trouble believing that it wasn’t intentional that it was there. And the response seems… absurd. “[F]ound himself [...] in front of a camera” and “ad-libbed” is about as plausible as me saying “But officer, I just happened to be in this tabernacle with a fire axe, and just happened to be practicing my ia-jitsu; I didn’t plan to desecrate anything.”

And to clarify for Fred, I mean that it’s not at all plausible.

Normally, I’d be sympathetic to what you’re saying, but in this case, not so much. For starters, the ad (linked by the Huckabee campaign here ) has precisely the highlights you claim are “severely tweaked,” including the dark side of the face. In fact, if anything, it looks a bit more faded in the still above than in the video itself.

Secondly, as much as I hate agreeing with Bill Donahue about anything, I find it more than a little hard to believe that cross imagery in an explicitly Christian ad by a candidate who has built his entire support network by pandering to evangelical Christians, could be anything other than intentional.

Morris:

If you’re accusing Bill Donahue of being full of hate, we finally agree on something!

As for the shoot, even a short spot like this takes hours to block out and light properly. All of which would be done without the talent there. And in this case without needing a script. So it is completely reasonable that the crew and director were there setting up everything and then Huckabee showed up, got in his makeup, and delivered the speech. If someone wrote out the speech beforhand, there was a script. If he worked it out in his head sitting in makeup, then there was no script. But the complexity of the shoot is unrelated to the script.

I addressed that explicitly in the following paragraph. (“put Huckabee and the camera on a rolling platform and roll it or rotate it”) It would have to be more than just him spinning on a stool – the camera has to move around him in a circle, and he doesn’t look like he’s doing the pushing himself. He’d also have to do it so that the cross and tree move to precisely selected positions, behind him, while he sits there, stealthily squirms his feet to move the stool without wiggling, and casually ad-libs an entire ad about Jesus to within two seconds’ accuracy, all without any preparation.

Nope.

I think the cross was intentional, but the accusation the were building elaborate moving sets to do it is just silly.

Hardly silly – that’s the way TV commercials are made. It’s commonplace (certainly much more so than the scenario above, which you yourself suggest is what happened).

Again, it doesn’t matter how the commercial was made – what’s startling is that they felt they had to lie about it.