Republican Recycling – the Flag Flap
Filed in Politics on Sep.06, 2008
Republican Recycling
by David Harsanyi on September 6, 2008
This morning, Republicans tell me that a worker at Invesco Field in Denver saved thousands of unused flags from the Democratic National Convention that were headed for the garbage. Guerrilla campaigning. They will use these flags at their own event today in Colorado Springs with John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Before McCain speaks today, veterans will haul these garbage bags filled with flags out onto the stage — with dramatic effect, no doubt — and tell the story.
September 6th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
This story smells to high Heaven. And I say that as a resident of Colorado Springs who was at Invesco that night.
All I suggest is that people think this through, just a bit.
There were 70,000 flags purchased by, I assume, the Democratic Party that were distributed all over Invesco, and they were waved proudly and repeatedly. My wife and I took ours home as mementos, as did most people. So we ought to be able to dispense with the “Dems hate the flag” nonsense, because the Dems surely didn’t buy 70,000 flags just because they hated the flag. In point of fact, they also bought and distributed a couple hundred 3′ x 5′ flags that they dispersed throughout the crowd, and those babies really were waved!
Now, I have no idea how much the flas cost, but they weren’t cheap. So I’m sure that, given their cost and given that they are flags, after all, the Dems bagged them with the intention of using them again elsewhere. It would have been disrespectful of the flag AND a tremendous waste of money and resources to do otherwise.
Now comes the fun….
Colorado Springs is a Republican haven in the middle of an otherwise almost all blue (or at least blue leaning) state. But El Paso County (where the Springs is located) is the second most populous county in the state and R’s outnumber D’s about 3 or 4 to 1, so El Paso County alone swings many statewide elections to the Republican candidate.
The El Paso County GOP is absolutely notorious for pulling all sorts of dirty little tricks like this. They have the mentality of the Nixon plumbers. And since they call all the shots in the county (a la the Dukes of Hazzard) they feel like they can do whatever they want.
I would not be surprised AT ALL if the Dem version of this story is correct: that the Republicans pilfered bags of flags and took them back to Colorado Springs for this rally today, to score propaganda points. I’d be curious to know if those bags are the way the Republicans “found” them; it sure looks awfully organized for trash getting tossed out.
And before the suggestion is made that the Dems surely would have noticed the loss of 12,000 flags, there’s a good chance that they wouldn’t. Like I said, many many people took their flags home with them, and with so much happening as people left Invesco (which was, to put it politely, not the best organized aspect of the day) I would doubt that there was time to take stock of how many flags were left behind.
Anyway, this again is MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. The Rovians have perfected this “hidden ball trick” style of campaigning, making huge deals out of small nothings, to divert attention from the real important issues.
Didn’t McBush’s campaign director say that his job was to make sure this election wasn’t about issues?
September 6th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Quite frankly the story amuses me. We will probably never know the truth of it, but what I do know is that it’s ridiculous that the two parties are fighting over this silly shit.
And of COURSE you think the Democratic Party’s story is the truthful one. That’s not a surprise.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:13 am
Without more facts being known, no one can know for sure. But I think most people (well, most non-PUMA people) often tend to act logically. If you analyze an issue and figure out who’s likely to benefit from any given set of events, odds are you’ll get it right mor often than not.
Bottom line is that the Democrats had no reason to throw out the flags, and they would have benefited by hanging on to them. Conversely, in this case, the Republicans had a lot of positive PR to gain if they claimed the Democrats threw the flags out and the grand and glorious GOP came in and rescued those poor discarded flags.
If only the GOP showed half as much concern for people that have been mistreated or discarded in our country.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:14 am
The Democratic Party does a lot of things without reason. When judging the actions of either party, logic has very little to do with it.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
You would think that supplies of any kind that were to be reused would be put back in the boxes they originally came in. In fact, you would think that if these flags were unused surplus, they would still be in those boxes.
Granted that this is much ado over very, very little. But the very carefully parsed Democratic statement that the “flags were taken without authorization” rather than “stolen” lends credibility to the opposition version. How much effort, after all, would it take to say, “We meant to save those flags for another rally, but some idiot screwed up and pitched them instead. We intended no disrespect to the flag and are upset at the very implication that we did. Oh, and we’d like them back, please, John.”