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Game of Thrones: Bush's Head Gets a Makeover
mahiskali writes "After apologizing for using a likeness of former President George W. Bush's head in the season finale of the first season of 'Game of Thrones,' HBO has digitally altered the offending scene. After releasing an formal apology, HBO proceeded to yank the episode off all digital platforms, as well as halt distribution of the Season 1 box sets. The episode is now back with an altered head; more hair, less chin. Show creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss later clarified, 'We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can't afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.'"
Because we're all sensitive douchenozzles.
How DARE someone offend my sacrosanct sensibilities! A pox on their houses! A boycott! A Congressional inquiry!!
I shall not rest until my right to not be offended is acknowledged!
This is either some kind of "clever" ploy to make already existing box sets scarce or a way to push people to pirate the unedited versions.
Or HBO really just has no balls and can't stand up for themselves. Probably that.
I see nothing saying the former president is even aware of it, much less has a beef about it.
For all his faults, I genuinely believe that George W Bush would laugh at this and not be offended. He is a goober, but a goober with a sense of humor.
If it had been a fake Obama head, there would have been a much bigger uproar. Personally, while I think it was intentional & tasteless, I don't think it deserved as much attention as it got. The directors probably could have gotten away with it if they didn't mention anything about it in the commentaries.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I think if it had been very obvious that it was Bush or Obama's head, I would have thought it was in bad taste, but when you actually see the head, you would never have known that was a Bush head if they had not have said something.
Yeah, but he's too much a goober to know he should be deeply deeply offended by this, so the vocal minority has to be doubly offended on his behalf!
(On a serious note, I do agree with your point. This seems like the sort of thing that'd just roll off his back. And note we haven't heard HIS side of the story on this, not that it would have ever mattered...)
Well, things were going pretty well for last six years of Clinton and the first six of GWBush.
Absolutely true, as long as you ignore the deficit going from effectively zero at the end of Clinton to very rapid growth during Bush, and guaranteed to get worse as his phased tax cuts continued. And as long as you pretend that the mortgage problems magically started in 2007 and were not a simmering but ignored issue for a decade. And if you ignore that real income for the lower 2/3rds of people was flat or decreased during that time, And if you ignore lots of other warning signs that "things are breaking and will be easy to fix now, but really hard later." Now it's later.
Pretending that things were good for Bush's first six years is a wonderful way of blaming the other guys, but does require lots of selective editing. Not that the other guys did all that well, but lots of indicators went into the red during 2001-2006.
That was a big part of it, sure, as well as the infighting between the republican congress and democratic president. And a large part of the current deficits are due to income tax losses from massive unemployment, but I figure that if people are going to blame Obama for the deficit now, then we have to thank Clinton for the deficit in 2000. Or we can realize that the deficits under both presidents were greatly affected by external factors.
The deficit under GWBush, on the other hand, should have decreased in 2003-2006 as the economy heated up with the real estate bubble. Since it increased, he gets to own some of that.
To get back on topic: it looks like the Game of Thrones set designers tried to make the head not obviously Bush's. Since nobody noticed until the commentary track came out, I've gotta go with "people are whiners". If people took half the time they spent being offended by little stuff and spent it cleaning up the litter in their neighborhood (yes, even if you weren't the one to litter; see "whiner") then the world would be a bit better tomorrow than it was yesterday. And that's a goal I think we all want.