McCain's Subliminal Attack?

No, but some on the left (and in the media) are having a good time with this:

ABC News' Rick Klein Reports: There's a longtime tradition in political advertising to look beyond the message to the subtext -- and even to the subliminal.

In that spirit, a veteran Democratic operative offers an interesting observation of the newly released anti-Obama Web video produced by the McCain campaign. The video is an eight-minute montage of sometimes contradictory statements about the Iraq war made by Sen. Barack Obama.

At the very beginning, the title -- “The Obama Iraq Documentary” -- flashes into place in a blaze of orange. And for a single frame -- a tiny fraction of a second -- Obama’s face is framed by the following prominent letters: “a l q D.”

Some caveats: “al qD” is meaningless by itself. The “l” is actually the capital “I” in "Iraq," though in the typeface used in the video, it looks like a lowercase “L.” Other letters -- at either end of the title -- are simultaneously on the screen. And many editing programs do allow randomized letter placement.

But still. . . . For a brief moment, Obama’s face is framed by letters that the brain may want to play with and spell something that does make sense. If you type “al qD” into Google, you get this response: “Did you mean: al qaeda.”

Well -- is that what the McCain campaign meant?

No, said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers, adding that the admakers used a “text randomizer,” where a computer randomly chose the order in which the letters would appear.

“The idea that it’s in any way done by the campaign intentionally is preposterous,” Rogers said when asked by ABC News whether the campaign meant to draw a link between Obama and al Qaeda.

Rogers added that tens of thousands of people have viewed the video since it was released Thursday afternoon, and no one had asked the campaign about the letters in the beginning of the ad before ABC was in touch.

“It’s so subliminal, even when it’s freeze-framed, it’s incomprehensible,” Rogers said. “We didn’t freeze-frame every frame in an eight-minute video to trouble shoot what liberal-bloggers might attack us for.”

Oh brother.