Legal Commentary

Legal, but offensively cocky: Obama rips off official presidential seal for his podium, and adds the motto "Vero Possumus"

By Beldar

Yeah, sure, I'd defend to the death Obama's technical legal right under the First Amendment to mangle national icons, burn flags, yada yada yada. It's a free country, and that freedom includes the right to engage in political expression that is crass, tasteless, and irredeemably cocky.

And one of the perquisites of being an incumbent president who's running for re-election is that, well, you actually are the POTUS, so you're entitled to speak to audiences from behind a podium that bears the official presidential seal. No one meets that description this year, however.

Nevertheless, the junior senator from Illinois, who's yet to complete his first term in the United States Senate, apparently feels entitled to rip off the most familiar elements of the official Seal of the President of the United States for his campaign use ? and then to combine it with some of his own campaign artwork:

 

According the the NYT Politics Blog (bold-face mine):

At a discussion with a dozen Democratic governors in Chicago on Friday morning, each of the governors was identified with a small name plate but Senator Barack Obama sat behind a low rostrum to which was attached an official-looking seal no one had seen before....

Just above the eagle?s head are the words ?Vero Possumus,? roughly translated ?Yes we can.? ...

Us God-loving, bitter, clinging gun-owners in the fly-over country have an expression for the kind of arrogance required to appropriate the seal of a public office to which one hasn't quite yet been elected: "He's dang sure gotten too big fer his britches," we'd say.

In response to which, someone might ask: "Can you folks usually find a way to deal with young fellas who're too big fer their britches?"

To which the answer ? which I'm sure is spoken confidently and frequently on at least the West Texas prairies of my own birth, and perhaps elsewhere ? is surely: "Vero Possumus!" Which, out here in fly-over land, roughly translates to: "You bet yer road-kill possum butt we can!" (I'll spare you the photographs of the possums, with or without the surrounding seal.)

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on June 20, 2008 (boomark / email).