Remind me…is it God or Patriotism that’s the last refuge of a scoundrel…?

Fake Soldiers Used In RNC Video

It was a video that was supposed to elicit soaring patriotism and real emotions about the Pledge of Allegiance. But to do that, it used fake soldiers and a staged military funeral instead of the real thing.

On Tuesday night, 15-year-old Victoria Blackstone, a sophomore at the St. Agnes School in St. Paul, led the crowd at the Xcel Energy Center in the Pledge of Allegiance. The audience heard her 434-word essay, “Pledging myself to the Flag of the United States of America,” an essay she’d entered in the “Wave the Stars & Stripes” essay contest and won. The RNC turned that essay into a three and a half minute video, a visually stirring montage rolling over Victoria’s words about sharing the Pledge with Americans who have stood at important moments in history.

There’s the Continental Congress…A real WWII vet…Photos of workers at Ground Zero. A close-up of a folded flag presented to a grieving widow at a military funeral… profiles of soldiers swelling with pride in slo-motion.

But CBS News found that the footage of the ‘funeral’ and soldiers is what is called ‘stock’ footage. The soldiers were actors and the funeral scene was from a one-day film shoot, produced in June. No real soldiers were used during production.

The footage, sold by stock-film house Getty Images was produced by a commercial filmmaker in Chicago. Both Getty and the production company, Mr. Big Films, confirmed that the footage was shot on spec and sold to the Republican National Committee.

One of the actors, Perry Denton of Chicago, Ill. also confirmed that he was hired on a day-rate as an actor for the shoot and told CBS News he was surprised to learn the footage was shown at the convention.

One argument would be that using real soldiers in a political campaign video would amount to manipulating the U.S. military for domestic political purposes.  As if they don’t already do that anyway…

But they could have easily found usable news footage of an actual military funeral if they wanted to.  I don’t think that thought ever crossed their minds.  Our armed forces have been nothing more to them then a prop they can use to gain and keep political power.  So the difference between a stock actor and a soldier doesn’t come immediately to mind and that’s why nobody questioned the use of actors in that video.  We’re all props on their stage as far as the republicans are concerned, every one of us.  And in any case, reality is what they say it is.