Is the Air Force One Flight over Manhattan Controversy Over for Obama … May Be Not … Where’s the Manifest?

Things that make you go hmm …

Does the picture of Air Force One flying low over the Statue of Liberty really look like a $328,835 photo? With the resignation of Louis Caldera, Barack Obama’s former director of the White House Military Office, many thought this controversy was over … but is it?

Ann Althouse brings up some interesting speculation as to other reasons why the flyover was done. As she states, “but look at the picture. Why would people going to all this trouble and expense to get a photograph that looked so awful?” Many people have asked that very same question. Why would a photo be taken from the cockpit of a fighter plane? One would think that a fighter would be equipped with a reconnaissance camera. After all, isn’t that what they did in the movie, Behind Enemy Lines? Heck, Scared Monkeys has dealt with search teams that use unmanned drones that do recon pics for search areas for missing persons where the quality looked better than this photo.

So Ann asks the next most obvious question, “Maybe the pilot took a photograph, but that can’t have been the purpose of the flight. So JAL has the right question: Who was in Air Force 1?” I idea is that since the photo was so bad at such a cost, maybe there was an alternative motive as to why Air Force One was there is the first place. Since the official review of the fiasco, seen HERE, created more questions than answered … It’s time to release the manifest.

As Moe Lane states, you know that really is a lousy picture for the price tag.  Here is the picture from the official White House site. From Protein Wisdom, of course the picture is crappy, New Jersey is visible, and we’re ready to cough just from looking at the air pollution evident in that photo. That’s funnier than 95% of the jokes from the White House Correspondence dinner over the weekend.

We had speculated from the outset of this flyover fiasco that how could such a ridiculous and beyond stupid premise of a 747 plane be allowed to fly over Manhattan followed by a fighter plane. How could any thinking adult not stand up and put an end to this as fast as the idea came off someone’s lips? Any thinking person had to know that it was a terrible idea and would cause chaos in the streets of NY. All this for a photo-op and a poor one at that. There are only two possibilities. Either all involved in the fiasco are incompetent or there was another reason why this stunt took place.

The grassy knoll has now met Air Force One and the flyover fiasco can do nothing but make you sit back and make you go hmm.