Someone, PLEASE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME!!!!! Have we lost our ever-loving minds??????

Whose broad stripes and bright stars?

Republican front-runners weren’t the only things missing from the presidential debate stage. The American flag was AWOL, too.

The backdrop to the “All-American Presidential Forum,” brought to you by Tavis Smiley and PBS, was a map of the United States, superimposed with a checkerboard of multicultural faces.

Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, one of the presidential hopefuls, asked debate organizers to get Old Glory up there, too, according to Chris Cavey, first vice chairman of the state GOP.

Cavey was acting as an escort for another candidate, Tom Tancredo of Colorado, and heard Hunter’s request over his earpiece about half an hour before the show began.

“Escorts were wired. I heard [in the earpiece], ‘Congressman Hunter is requesting a flag on stage,’” Cavey said.

Request denied.

Forum organizers have not returned calls or made a statement about their refusal to put an American flag on the stage during a debate of American Presidential candidates!

The buzz among some Republicans was that organizers thought the flag might “offend” some members of the audience. Cavey, while critical of the decision, chalks it up to aesthetics, not politics. Red-white-and-blue simply would have clashed with the map’s yellow-to-burnt-orange hues.

“I feel it was all just Hollywood,” Cavey said. “They had their idea of what the set should look like. It was very nice. It was a very, very professional-looking set. Someone had spent a lot of time and money designing it. But whoever planned it didn’t have a flag. None of those producers had the authority to say, ‘Oh, crap, we forgot the flag. Let’s put it in the corner.’ The set-builders’ union would have gone on strike.”

Isn’t it possible that the producers just couldn’t find a flag in time after Hunter raised the issue?

“They could have walked across the street to the police station to get a flag in half an hour, and I know personally that Morgan State University has a flag somewhere,” Cavey said. “I thought it was absolutely inappropriate that the ‘All-American Presidential Debate’ couldn’t even produce an American flag.”

I can see that going either way. It is within reason to think that some people in this country would consider it ‘offensive’ to exhibit anything that remotely represented patriotism. On the other hand, I can see that some people would be more concerned with complementary hues than with having an American flag displayed in a presidential debate.

Either way, it shows just how far down the flag has gone down. Not only is it outrageous that anyone would CARE if it offended anyone but its below hues now.

God help us.

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Others commenting on this – Michelle Malkin, PC Free Zone, Inside Charm City, Tai-Chi, California Yankee