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Some people are just idiots, willing to take a "principled" stand, but generally just content to make a jackass out of themselves. For those people, we have found your leader (H/T Mary Katharine Ham):

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours' delay, one of Eason's employees hung the flags at half-staff.

The brouhaha began late Sunday night, when Eason e-mailed eight of his employees in the state standards lab, which calibrates measuring equipment used on things as widely varied as gasoline and hamburgers.

"Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week," Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.

He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his "doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice" and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Like any good liberal flunky, he protested "negativity, hate, and prejudice" by displaying.....negativity, hate, and prejudice.

Whether or not Eason like Senator Helms or didn't like Senator Helms, the occurrence of the Senator's death certainly was not the time to launch into some cockamamie protest, made even more disturbing by the fact that he was a State Employee defying the will of the Governor of North Carolina. Even more so, this clown actually thought the lab belonged to him:

Eason and a previous boss had sketched out the building's rough design on a napkin at the Atlanta airport in 1984 after attending a national conference on weights and measures.

He then worked to get funding for it in the state budget, and he recently helped snag state money to study building another lab.

"I designed and built that lab," he said. "Even though technically the bricks and mortar belong to the state of North Carolina, I feel very strongly that everything that comes out of there is my responsibility."

Nobody is saying that Senator Helms may have taken controversial positions, but I wonder if this Eason charachter would have objected if it were a controversial Democrat who passed.

This guy Eason is not only is an airhead, but combines that with the worst liberal qualities of privilege, arrogance and entitlement. I frankly am glad that this clown was shown the door, and am glad that he was not a state employee here in Maryland; I certainly wouldn't want somebody with his lack of character getting paid out of my tax dollars...