In the past, advertisers and marketing specialists worked hard to develop eye-catching sales campaigns. They slaved away, attempting to create ads that people remembered when shopping at local malls. The commercials were humorous, heart felt or just plain cute.

But now, every advertiser is fighting for their piece of the patriotic pie. Ads are saturated with red, white and blue. And even though it’s been happening more and more since Sept. 11, the Super Bowl was the saddest example of patriotic ads going too far.

One of the worst examples was the Anheuser-Busch commercial that featured Clydesdales making a pilgrimage from their St. Louis homes, over the Brooklyn Bridge to New York City, where the horses stopped to bow their heads at Ground Zero. This clever ad managed to make drinking beer a patriotic event. After all, it’s Budweiser that’s American. Drink Miller Lite and the terrorists have already won.

In addition to beer companies using patriotism, automotive companies are also falling over each other trying to get people to buy “American” when they buy their next vehicle. It’s unbelievable how well patriotism can be packaged with products purporting a “if you hate terrorism, you’ll buy this car” attitude.

One example is the General Motors commercial, in which the company sells the point of its partnership with the United Auto Workers Union for the “donation of time, parts and labor” for new vehicles for the New York Fire Department.

Maybe the worst example of the overboard advertisements was the 30 second public announcements funded by the White House suggesting that buying and using illegal drugs is financing terrorism in places like Afghanistan.

This blatant misinformation is political propaganda at its absolute finest. Apparently, the “either with us or against us” argument now pertains to the occasional pot smoker among us.

The list goes on. Just look closer to home.

Every time a reader views The Des Moines Register’s Web site, a pop-up advertisement drowned in red, white and blue greets the viewer before any news. The ad features a cozy coffee mug with an American flag on one side and a red “United We Stand” with the Des Moines Register logo on the other. By paying an electronic subscription, the reader gets a free U.S.A. mug.

So next time you pick up a Des Moines Register, remember how proud you are to be an American. And if you’re not American, maybe you can just remember how much you wish you were.

In the past, patriotic promotions were left to the government news services.

But now companies across the nation are using the fact that the country is fighting a war on terrorism to win an economic war between companies.

Sex doesn’t sell anymore. Flags do.

editorialboard: Andrea Hauser, Tim Paluch, Michelle Kann, Charlie Weaver, Omar Tesdall