On the heels of Republican outrage over the DCCC’s use of war imagery in a web video, Sen. [tag]Mike DeWine[/tag] (R-Ohio) muddled the GOP message by launching a new TV ad with images of 9/11. Republican leaders had some trouble explaining why something is offensive when Dems do it, but reasonable when the GOP does it.
But as it turns out, there’s more to this story. DeWine not only exploited 9/11 images in a campaign commercial, he [tag]doctored[/tag] those images.
The controversial video of the burning World Trade Center towers in a television campaign [tag]ad[/tag] for Ohio Sen. Mike [tag]DeWine[/tag] is doctored, U.S. News has learned. The television spot, which has been lambasted by critics as a political exploitation of the [tag]Sept. 11[/tag], attacks Democrat challenger Rep. Sherrod Brown for being weak on national security.
On the air in major Ohio markets since last Friday, the ad shows the towers, with the south building billowing smoke, which gradually drifts upward. In the video, the north tower, which was struck first on September 11, is undamaged.
“This particular image is impossible,” says W. Gene Corley, a structural engineer who led FEMA’s building performance study on the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. Corley reviewed the ad atwww.brownvotes.com for U.S. News. “The north tower was hit first [so] the south tower could not be burning without the North Tower burning.” Corley also says, “the smoke is all wrong.” The day of the attacks, the plumes of ash were drifting to the southeast. “The smoke on 9/11 was never in a halo like that,” Corley says.
A DeWine spokesperson acknowledged that the image had been manipulated. In what has to be one of my favorite euphemisms in a long time, the [tag]Republican[/tag] released an official statement calling the doctored image a “graphic representation.”
And who was responsible for making the ad? That’s a funny story too.
As the AP reported:
DeWine’s campaign spokesman, Brian Seitchik, called the image in the original ad a “graphic representation,” produced by the advertising production firm Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm. […]
Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm did not immediately return calls seeking comment. The firm also produced the controversial [tag]Swift Boat[/tag] Veterans for Truth ads in 2004, which accused Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry of lying about his decorated Vietnam War record.
As for the substance here, DeWine should take considerable heat over this. It’s one thing to misuse 9/11 imagery for partisan gain; it’s another to say [tag]9/11[/tag] imagery wasn’t horrifying enough so it became necessary to hire the Swifties’ ad agency to give the terrorist attacks a little “touch up.”
We can now expect all the Republicans who whined incessantly about the mild DCCC ad to condemn DeWine for this shameless stunt, right?