Flag on Obama's Plane, Part Deux

This is part of the ongoing silly saga of the American flag being removed from Obama's campaign jet. For some quick background, here's the first post, which pointed out that ALL North American Airlines charter jets have flags on their tails so 'removing' it was a natural part of repainting the plane into official Obama campaign livery. No story there.

But having just checked Obama's 'fightthesmears' website a follow-up post is in order. Obama has completely distorted the controversy, stating the charge as follows:

Barack Obama has been attacked for not having an American Flag on his campaign airplane.

Not exactly. He was attacked for removing the huge US flag waving on the tail fin. Here's the response:

Barack Obama does indeed have an American flag displayed on the outside of this campaign airplane.

Here's their picture proof:



Well OK, he's got a tiny flag next to the N number but this is really a "whoopdee do" moment. Most US commercial aircraft have a small flag somewhere on the fuselage, evidenced by this United 757, this American 757, this Delta 757, and this Northwest 757. That's almost like bragging that it still has a paint job.

The real response was that all North American Airlines planes have large tail flags but they probably didn't want to invite question as to why he felt the need to replace it with the Big O while opting to downsize the flag to a postage stamp, so they're just saying "it's still there." Crafty, these politicians are.

By the way, as to the incident in July where Obama's charted Midwest MD-81 declared an emergency the FAA initially says it didn't, chalk it up as yet another embarrassment for a government agency. But Brian Ross's dramatic description of controllers asking for "souls onboard and fuel" is really nothing unusual, since it's SOP anytime a plane declares an emergency. And the controllers almost certainly knew Obama was one of those souls onboard.