Bush's latest campaign ad experiments with human cloning.

Re: the "Whatever It Takes" TV spot for Bush/Cheney: This seems like a pretty minor pretext for a controversy, not really worth the attention it's gotten this late in the campaign. The alteration in the image in question—the "cloning" of a small group of soldiers' faces to pad out the crowd scene—is essentially a cosmetic one, rather than a piece of visual disinformation designed to mislead (like the doctored photo picturing Kerry onstage with Jane Fonda that circulated on the Internet earlier in the campaign). Then again, that was the work of some anonymous blogger wag, not an official campaign commercial.

Still, looking at the before and after versions of the doctored ad, I couldn't help thinking: What would it feel like to be one of the five men whose faces were reproduced in different parts of the crowd? Might it not give you an eerie sense that the administration that had sent you to war regarded you less as a person than as an interchangeable image, like the computer-animated soldiers in the huge battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings? (If you looked closely at those films, you could also identify clumps of repeated figures.) It may be that the individuals whose images were used in this way have no problem with it at all—after all, the function of the crowd shot for the purposes of this ad is to represent "the troops" as a whole, not to offer individual portraits of each listener. But it's to be hoped that whoever is elected commander in chief next week doesn't treat the men and women in Iraq as similarly replaceable. ... 10:38 a.m.

Update: a Frayster has informed me that the Lord of the Rings war scenes did not, in fact, reproduce figures in "clumps," but rather used a new animation technology called MASSIVE that allowed each of a group of identical figures to move independently. I'd like to thank BenK for his correction, and point out that, that being the case, the "Whatever It Takes" ad's vision of the individuality of soldiers in Iraq is less nuanced than Peter Jackson's vision of the evil army of orcs. ... 12:42 pm

Last night's Voting Booth Poll on CNN's Paula Zahn Now:

"Who do you think might persuade more voters to support their candidate?

     Arnold Schwarzenegger  56%

     Bruce Springsteen         44%

Remember, this is a sampling of visitors to our website, not a scientific poll."

Unscientific? So where are viewers to turn for an accurate assessment of public on Conan the Barbarian'schances against the Jersey troubadour? Get Zogby on the phone!

As useful statistics go, this faux fact ranks somewhere a notch below "Choosy Mothers Choose Jif."  Still, I'll be spending the next four days mumbling Teutonic catchphrases and humming "Born to Run." Whichever one is stuck in my head on Election Day, that's who I'm voting for. Wait … Arnold and Bruce aren't on the ballot?  ... 7:26 a.m.