Well I'm all for bashing McCain anytime I have a free moment (which usually comes when I get exhausted of bashing Sarah Palin), but this latest controversy is a bit of a dick move on the liberal side.

Jill Greenberg is a photographer hired by The Atlantic to shoot John McCain for their cover. Normally Greenberg is well known for her fabulous lighting and retouching techiniques that could make Janet Reno look like Cindy Crawford, but this time, she played things a bit differently.

"'I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,' she says."

And then, she started screwing with the lighting.

"She had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.” What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds."

The end result is the horrifying picture you see above where McCain looks like he's a 1000 year-old James Bond villain. I actually feel pretty bad for the guy, and the woman is clearly a bit on the loopy side. McCain's policies alone should be enough to sink him, we shouldn't need to bash him as an ugly old man as well. 

(all images credited to The Atlantic and Jill Greenberg)