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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29505 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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I'm also stuck in this world, where politicians taking media from military cemeteries for political ads has both long been tolerated

The link you provide shows an image from a video, and when you watch the video it has in a tiny font a disclaimer that the use of DoD images does not inply any endorsement.

From what I understand, Bthe law prohibits use of private photogs for campaign activities on the cemetary grounds.

So it seems that there is a minute, and trivial difference.

I wonder why Trump didn't just use the DoD footage from all the times he visited Arlington as president?

EDIT: if you'd like a more recent and undisclaimered example, this was from 2021.

From what I understand, the law prohibits use of private photogs for campaign activities on the cemetary grounds.

Which would be fascinating, given the official Army response was not that the photographers were specifically the problem, but that regulations "clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds". And no one at the Army is pointing to the specific rule either way directly.

Some other groups have pointed to CFR 32-553.32, but that doesn't care at all about photographers, and depends on a ludicrously vague definition of 'partisan political activity' (here, largely devolving into "but Trump"), and the regulation allows nothing more than the ANC's Executive Director to ban someone, which can't be delegated. Worse, the Trump campaign claims to have gotten explicit permission from Arlington beforehand, albeit. The closest I can find for an actual statutory, rather than regulatory, prohibition is one on demonstrations separate from ceremonies, which doesn't apply here. Others point to the Hatch Act, but that applies more to use of video and imagery taken during a political career -- the Hatch Act excludes the President and VP, but doesn't allow everyone working under their orders a Get Out of Hatch Jail Free Card.

((Uh, overlooking the bit where the Hatch Act is also basically unenforced.))

I wonder why Trump didn't just use the DoD footage from all the times he visited Arlington as president?

No small part of the point of this particular circus is to highlight the Abbey Gate families, and implicitly that the Biden-Harris administration has generally not met with or supported them. Since Abbey Gate happened in August 2021, that would be after Trump left the Presidency.

“No using cemetery grounds for political campaign purposes” doesn’t seem like “a ludicrously vague definition of 'partisan political activity'” to me.

Also, are there prior instances of political campaigning in that same spot that were ignored? If not, is it not reasonable for Arlington cemetery staff to enforce cemetery-specific norms and rules regardless of what laws have been explicitly passed?

The 2021 example linked above was specifically Biden in the same section of Arlington. And I can give more.

Ah I missed that edit. Thanks, that is exactly what I was looking for.

Although I don’t see how your latest link in this comment is an example of Democrat hypocrisy.

But the letters of the law and regulations don't matter. They can always fall back to "norms", and if you point to Democrats doing the same thing, they can always find or fabricate a distinguisher. What matters is control of the press, which the Democrats have, so this is spun as "Trump campaign violates rules by using Arlington National Cemetery for a photo-op and brutalizes totally innocent non-partisan employee who tries to stop them". And that's the pravda.

I am not able to find the source I saw last night saying that the private photog was an issue in the law, but for what it's worth Trump's campaign made it a point that their photog was allowed in.

"The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump's team during a very solemn ceremony," Cheung said in the statement.

I doubt very much this issue actually gathers any steam. But if it'd did, I'm guessing a lot of the juice would be around the permission Trump's campaign has claimed to have gotten.

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