…at least that’s the question asked by 24thState:
Now, far be it from me to tell the Secretary of State of Missouri that it’s disrespectful to put the state flag of Missouri to the right and put the United States Flag to the left, but maybe she’s trying to tell us something? Is she one of those dreaded Tenthers? She’s run away and to the right of Barack Obama on every issue since he came to town – maybe she’s joining Peter Kinder in asserting Missouri’s constitutional rights?
…Nah, the truth is she’s just got a lot of dolts working for her who not only don’t know the Flag Code, but wouldn’t take it seriously if they did. For that matter, she didn’t notice, either. Ah, the Carnahans; I shall miss them, when they’re gone…
Moe Lane
PS: Roy Blunt for Senate. Old Glory on the right.
PPS: Come, I will conceal nothing from you: the VRWC loves the reaction that the netroots have whenever we use stories like these to illustrate the completely reasonable and self-evident point that Democratic party stalwarts above a certain level pretend to be supportive of a whole list of civic traditions while actually being ignorant of them at best, and contemptuously dismissive at worst. Stories like these usually – I say ‘usually’ because I’m telegraphing this particular punch – spark feverish research by the Other Side to find a counter-example, in order to put it up in full triumphal-snark mode. And they usually find one.
And we privately grin, pat them on the head for reaffirming the narrative like that, and go on our merry way. Because here is the corollary to the annoying political truth that ‘no Democrat ever has to prove that he isn’t a racist:’ no Republican ever has to prove that she isn’t unpatriotic. You can safely assume that if the GOP messes up a photo-op like this, it’s because there’s a law of averages; even eagle-eyed guys on the campaign who spent twenty years in the Marines and now gives everything a look-over once before the press conference starts will have sick days. And you can also safely assume that if the Democrats mess up a photo-op like this, it’s because they considered the job sufficiently unimportant to hand off to some post-college intern who thinks it’d be really funny to fly the flags upside down and who couldn’t pick out his own state’s flag in a lineup. Put it another way: the one is a failure in implementation, the other is a failure in priorities.
Unfair? In this case, not really. Our current self-defined aristos on the Left really don’t care about any of this stuff, and they get pretty annoyed when they have to pretend to care.