October 30, 2014 01:46 PM UTC

Citizens United: The Ultimate Colorado Politics Faux Pas

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• by: Colorado Pols

We wrote earlier this week about the new "shockumentary" from national conservative filmmakers Citizens United on the "takeover" of Colorado by Democrats beginning in 2004, Rocky Mountain Heist. As we discussed, the film is mostly a hyped-up version of Adam Schrager's excellent book on the same subject, Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado, with as much bombast as host Michelle Malkin could muster (which is apparently quite a lot). Mostly the film doesn't allege anything more than, well, really effective Democrats–and where it does, it's so inaccurate that it's more or less laughable.

Although Rocky Mountain Heist is now available online to watch for free online, we ordered a DVD copy almost two weeks ago. It finally arrived yesterday, and we were immediately struck by the cover photo:

The mountains in the background of the DVD cover for Citizens United's Rocky Mountain Heist are indeed in the Rocky Mountains. The problem is, this is a photo of the Canadian Rockies. The image you see is a very common stock photo of Moraine Lake, located in Banff National Park in Alberta. Here's another photo of this picturesque but foreign location:

In Colorado politics, one of the worst embarrassments possible is the use of mountains not located in our state in campaign ads and literature. Back in August, National Right To Life pulled down a social media graphic touting their endorsement of Cory Gardner after it was found to feature Wyoming's Mount Moran. Earlier this year, the Colorado GOP's independent expenditure committee used photos of Utah to extol "restoring Republican values to Colorado." Back in 2009, Scott McInnis used a photo from the same Banff National Park in Canada on his website, and in 2008 Bob Schaffer's family jumped out of a photo of Alaska's Denali instead of the intended Pikes Peak in a campaign TV spot. Most of these incidents were followed by lampooning local media coverage.

To some this may seem like small potatoes, but the truth is that proud Coloradans do not appreciate these kinds of mistakes–coming across as pandering by out-of-state interests to whom "all mountains look alike." Colorado has worked hard to overcome our flyover state reputation, and this is the exactly the sort of indifference that rips the scab off that longstanding resentment. It's also an inexcusably-lazy mistake to have made, particularly when so many others have already tripped over this.

Colorado Democrats in particular should find it pretty ironic.