Wow.

I read a story in the New Zealand news today about complaints about the billboard below (link here, but links to this news site go dead after a day or two, so I'll summarise the story).



The advert is by the New Zealand company Hell's Pizza, which is fairly controversial with its advertising campaign at the best of times (notably sending condoms in the mail to all NZ households last year). But what I think is hilarious is the response from the representative of the advertising agency that came up with the concept of the George Bush billboard:

"We believe, and given the even greater opposition to the war in Iraq and George Bush's plummeting popularity among voters in the US, that the billboard was not only socially responsible, but incredibly prescient given events that have unfolded subsequently."

Also:

"much to our chagrin, the billboard company acted unilaterally (much like George Bush in fact) and removed the billboard as soon as it received complaints".

And:

"We would point the board to the seminal work [by Barry Crump]. Bastards I Have Met was a wide-ranging almost academic study of the different types of bastard that one could encounter throughout New Zealand.

Of course George Bush had not yet come to prominence when Crump was writing, but had he been in office at the time, and if Barry had met him, I feel sure he would have qualified for his own chapter, headed 'Evil Bastard'.

As it stands, George W could certainly fit within the genus of bastard identified as a `Bad bastard' (bastardus skullduggerus), or arguably for a subgroup of this particular type of bastard – the `real bad bastard' – although that is not for us to say."