Boy, oh boy. Earlier this week, Sen. Mike Dewine (R-OH) drew controversy for using images of 9/11 in an attack ad, which assails Dem candidate Sherrod Brown’s commitment to national security. The ad came shortly after Republicans attacked Democrats for running an ad with images of flag-draped coffins on the internet.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The image of the burning twin towers in the ad was doctored. As Dewine’s spokesman admitted to U.S. News and World Report, “the image of the burning towers in the ad is a still photo with computer-generated smoke added.”
Luckily, Greg Sargent and the team over at Election Central captured the original ad, and from this still, it’s hard to believe that this went unnoticed for so long:
Here’s U.S. News’ expert explaining how very fake the image is:
“This particular image is impossible,” says W. Gene Corley, a stuctural engineer who led FEMA’s building performance study on the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. Corley reviewed the ad atwww.brownvotes.com for U.S. News. “The north tower was hit first [so] the south tower could not be burning without the North Tower burning.” Corley also says, “the smoke is all wrong.” The day of the attacks, the plumes of ash were drifting to the southeast. “The smoke on 9/11 was never in a halo like that,” Corley says.
Dewine’s campaign says that they’ll be replacing the doctored image with a still of the towers before the attacks.
Update: Ah. The AP reports that the ad was created by Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, the same shop that produced the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads in 2004.
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