Lib Media Says Allen West Violated Flag Code

By Jennifer Epstein, Politico

Rep. Allen West is in hot water with a local blogger after he led a group of veterans on a scubadiving trip off the coast of his Florida district over the weekend and planted a American flag underwater on an artificial reef.

The blogger on the Broward-Palm Beach New Times’s website is accusing him of violating the United States Code by putting the flag in water and flying it below ground level.

“Rep. Allen West going diving off the coast of Deerfield Beach with a bunch of military veterans — except for the fact that he violated U.S. federal law in the process and provided a pictorial of himself doing so,” a blogger on the Broward-Palm Beach New Times’s website wrote early Tuesday morning.

The accusation which, incidentally, comes on Flag Day, is that West, a first-term tea-party-backed Republican, violated the Flag Code, which stipulates that “[t]he flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.”