Via Mediaite, I see that right-wingers are freaking at the fact that someone at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday waved an Obama flag at the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington.
Twitchy collects angry tweets -- one right-wight tweeter calls this "Ugly & Scary." Elsewhere, talk of flag respect is in the air. Scared Monkeys (emphasis in original):
STOP DESECRATING THE AMERICAN FLAG!!! Could the LEFT be more offensive?This righty blogger writes, "Where do you draw the line on flag desecration?" And so on and so on.
Now, as we all know, the 1963 March took place at the Lincoln Memorial -- and one thing is for sure, Abraham Lincoln sure as heck would have been appalled at this sort of flag desecration! Right?
Well, actually, no:
No, I don't think so:
At one time it was very common for presidential campaigns to make parade flags on which the stars were replaced by an image of the candidate (or ticket). It wasn't just Lincoln: here's a Grant/Colfax flag; here are McKinley/Roosevelt and Bryan/Stevenson flags.
The laws may have changed since then -- legal efforts to turn the flag into a sacred object seem to date to the early twentieth century -- but this sort of thing used to be very common in America.
And even under current laws, I don't seem to recall any right-wingers yelling "Desecration!" at this:
Or this "Second American Revolution" flag, which is very popular:
Where's the outrage, right-wing flag lovers?
