Birther tea party rep. refuses to stand near Obama photo, moves away U.S. flag

A tea party-back Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Missouri this week asked that a flag be moved because she did not want to stand near a photo of President Barack Obama during a press conference.

According to the Columbia Daily Tribune, Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) had some difficulty locating the perfect spot for a press conference following her tour of Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital on Tuesday.

After the sun made one location with windows problematic for the news cameras, reporter Rudi Keller suggested that she stand next to the American flag near the entrance.

But there was a problem: a photo of the president was right next to the flag.

Hartzler summoned press aide Steve Walsh to move the flag away from the photo and the press conference was allowed to begin.

Keller asked the Republican congresswoman why she had refused to stand next to the president's photo.

“So there’s going to be an article about that, eh?,” she lamented.

“Yeah, I’m curious about that,” Keller replied. “What’s the problem?”

“She didn’t want to upstage Gen. Shinseki,” Walsh offered, noting that there was a photo of Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki next to Obama's photo.

“Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, yeah,” Hartzler said. “Oh dear, I’ll never live that one down.”

Last year, Hartzler had told a group of people at a town hall that she had "a lot of doubts" about Obama's birth certificate.

"But I don’t understand why he didn’t show that right away. I mean, if someone asked for my birth certificate, I’d get my baby book and hand it out and say ‘Here it is,’ so I don’t know," she said.

The congresswoman later added to the Sedalia Democrat that she had "doubts that it is really his real birth certificate, and I think a lot of Americans do, but they claim it is, so we are just going to go with that."