April 23, 2022 11:56 AM UTC

"The босс"--Amateur O'Dea Outdoes The Moving Mountain

• 4 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

One of the classic errors made by (almost always Republican) candidates trying just a little too hard to prove their local mettle running in Colorado is the use of images of mountains in campaign ads and literature that, albeit picturesque, are not actually located in the state of Colorado. From the state party’s use of beautiful Utah canyonlands to backdrop their pledge to “restore Republican values to Colorado” to the infamous case of 2008 U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer depicted with his family popping out from around Alaska’s Denali, it’s been an amusing if somewhat ominous indicator of something, you know, not quite clicking.

Well folks, as Roll Call reported yesterday, there’s another way to screw the proverbial pooch as badly as transplanting out-of-state mountains to Colorado, perhaps much worse in our present time of war:

Colorado Republican Senate candidate Joe O’Dea promises to “support the police and military,” in a television ad that featured footage of a half-dozen planes flying in formation against a backdrop of fluffy, white clouds.

Only, those weren’t American planes. Three experts on military aviation, after viewing the ad, concluded independently that the aircraft used in the ad by a Republican vying to challenge Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet are a mix of Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets — possibly flying in a Russian military parade. [Pols emphasis]

So, we don’t claim to be experts in the field of plane-spotting, but we’re familiar enough from our layman’s armchair with the world’s air forces to know those are not American-made aircraft. And if they’re not American-made, the possibilities narrow pretty rapidly to something rather dreadful in the context of today’s headlines:

Richard Aboulafia, managing director of Aerodynamic Advisory, an aerospace consulting firm, said the various models of aircraft shown in the footage are “almost certainly” members of the Sukhoi Su-30 family of fighter jets.

“Since these are the mainstay of the Russian air force’s Ukraine war operations, this is a particularly regrettable choice of footage,” Aboulafia said in an email. [Pols emphasis]

About as regrettable as humanly possible, we’d say! If we take the visual at face value, Joe O’Dea is now America’s foremost Russia booster this side of Tucker Carlson himself. And unfortunately, the keywords appended to this clip of video at Shutterstock leave the O’Dea campaign with little excuse:

Joe O’Dea is himself a political neophyte with no experience running any kind of political campaign, let alone a U.S. Senate race against a seasoned two-term incumbent. But O’Dea’s political consultant team, which includes former GOP gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry and his allegedly top-shelf Ascent Media/76 Group, has no excuse for this kind of carelessness. In World War II, if a candidate for office had substituted a photo of Japanese Zeros for American planes in their handbills they’d have been run out of town.

Like realistic Republican aspirations in this race, the standards have fallen.