This community has done an excellent job of following this particularly nasty little race. See
Screwy Squirrel's entry, for a stomach turning television ad. Also,
Duke1676 had a look. Jamison Heart
took things one step further in a meeting with Vernon Robinson. Finally, Brad Miller himself has done a good job
cataloging this race. I'm just curious about one particular image in one of Vernon Robinson's TV ads. More below the fold.
This attack ad by Vernon Robinson does a really good job of summing up why I'm glad to live in NC-13 and able to vote for Brad Miller. The interesting bit occurs about 39 seconds into the ad, when this image is shown:
The voiceover speaks about "illegal aliens" taking our jobs, and burning our flag. The image is a bit cropped, but one can clearly see the flag burning. Something just seemed out of place to me in that picture. I remember all the noise that the wingnuts were making about the waving of Mexican flags during the recent immigration marches, but I don't recall any stories about flag burning. Well, a few minutes of google image searching unearthed this image from a blog in 2000:
Reversed and cropped, but definitely the same picture. Furthermore, clearly visible in the portion cropped out of the ad is a flag which is either Jordanian or Palestinian, but NOT Mexican.
Nothing to get too excited about, but it appears that when this ad was put together, somebody found a picture of some brown people burning a flag, and figured that it would pass to imply by context that they were "illegal immigrants" burning our flag on our soil. At the least, this is supremely irresponsible laziness. At the worst, downright racism.
I'm having trouble pinpointing exactly when and where this picture is from, so I can't call this diary a slam dunk. If anyone has any info, placing it in the comments would be great!