OMG! OMG! At a rally in Reno, Sarah Palin wore a donkey-themed scarf, just like the Democratic Party's logo!

The mindless, Obama-supporting drones across the internet are using this as yet another instance of their attempts to portray Palin as the new Dan Quayle. Just one problem: there's the strong possibility that some cute little prankster planted it on her. From this interview with the photographer who took the picture:

The Reno event "went down like any other campaign rally," [Max Whittaker, a professional photog from Sacramento] says. Palin did not have a scarf on during her speech and wasn't wearing it "at least the first five or ten minutes of working the rope line" afterward. Whittaker worked his way through the post-speech crowd toward Palin and "shot her for about 5 minutes until she was out of my sight, and she had the scarf on the whole time." How did she get it? It's still unclear, but Whittaker notes that in the meet-and-greet-frenzy "it's pretty inconceivable that anything happened beyond someone in the crowd giving her this scarf. I can't see her suddenly pulling it out of her handbag in this rope line." When he went to shoot her a half-hour later for an interview with CNN, the scarf had disappeared, he said.

Whittaker himself said he didn't notice it at first, but then he got a laugh out of it when he saw what it was. Others who got a laugh out of it include the Kos Kids (dailykos.com/story/2008/10/22/83752/893/194/638476), HuffPost, and, of course, Newsweek [1].

Can anyone review tapes of the event to see if we can find out who planted this on her?

[1] blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/10/21/
in-which-sarah-palin-displays-the-latest-in-donkey-fashion.aspx