Busted! National Review Crops and “Dirties” Photo From Austin Walmart, Claims It Shows “Venezuela”
Get a load of this….
So Michelle Malkin in National Review did a piece on Bernie Sanders a few days ago, still whining about the underarm deodorant issue…
Ask Venezuelans How Sanders-Style Socialism Is Working Out for Them
Wow, horrible pic of some lady in a store with empty shelves and disgustingly dirty too — along with a caption “Venezuela’s vibrant economy.”
So I did an image search and turned up this….
Defying the Laws of Physics at Walmart
Now it appears that this may be a Wal-Mart in Wisconsin (?), but it’s not clear from the story. But if you look at a larger version of the image, you can see the English signs in the background, so it’s clearly NOT from Venezuela.
So whoever posted this story to National Review purposely cropped out the English signs and then applied a dirty filter to it — because we all know Hispanics are filthy people, right?
In an argument with a wingnut friend of mine, his response was “It’s clearly a stock photo.” ORLY? Even if true, why crop it, make it dirty, and label it as a sign of Venezuela’s economy?
So, bottom line, a scare story about empty shelves that will plague the U.S. if Sanders is elected used a picture from a Wal-Mart in the U.S. that had trouble keeping their shelves stocked.
LGF contributor Backwoods_Sleuth discovered the true origin of the photo, from a 2005 post at this blog: Fergie’s Tech Blog: Austin Hurricane Panic Insanity.
The photographer was Jay Janner from the Austin-American Statesman, and the photo shows a Walmart in Austin, Texas. The original caption from their front page:
“Preparing for Hurricane Rita, Maria Chavez of Austin looks for a loaf of bread Thursday in the empty shelves of a Wal-Mart at Interstate 35 and Slaughter Lane. The store was sold out.”