Hey Nike, you blew it by dissing Betsy Ross

After watching one of America’s corporate giants bail on Betsy Ross, Gov. Doug Ducey decided to Just Do It.

In a series of overnight tweets, Ducey announced he is yanking what amounts to a million dollars in state incentives offered to get Nike to build a manufacturing plant in the suburban city of Goodyear.

“Instead of celebrating American history the week of our nation’s independence, Nike has apparently decided that Betsy Ross is unworthy, and has bowed to the current onslaught of political correctness and historical revisionism,” Ducey wrote in a series of tweets early Tuesday.

Nike had planned to release the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July, featuring the Betsy Ross flag, on July 1 but instead benched it because Colin Kaepernick was offended.

Cue the Wall Street Journal: “After images of the shoe were posted online, Mr. Kaepernick, a Nike endorser, reached out to company officials saying that he and others felt the Betsy Ross flag is an offensive symbol because of its connection to an era of slavery.”

It seems some white nationalist groups in the Patriot Movement have taken to waving the Betsy Ross flag, the one with 13 stars in a circle and 13 stripes. So because a bunch of ignorant jerks co-opted America’s first flag, one of America’s major companies put on a pair of its overpriced footwear and sprinted into full-fledged retreat.

Sorry, Nike, but you red, white and blew it.

I will mourn not for the $140 shoe that suddenly has become one stinky sneaker. But I marvel that the foundation of one of America’s corporate giants is apparently the consistency of weak pudding.

We can debate whether Betsy Ross was the actual seamstress of America’s first flag. There’s no documentation of that. But to pull it because a bunch of misfits have co-opted that flag for their cause shows a distinct lack of backbone.

White nationalists also drape themselves in red, white and blue and call themselves patriots. Does that mean America's colors are now offensive? That patriotism is a dirty word?

And if we are now banning all things from the “era of slavery,” does that mean that George Washington should be given the old heave-ho? Should his name be stripped from our nation's Capitol? From major streets in virtually every city in America?

Should we even be celebrating our nation's founding this week, given that it came during "an era of slavery" and was accomplished at the hands of slave owners?

Nike has taken its stand — if you can call full-scale capitulation a stand.

And now, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey

has taken a stand, too, against the bullies who would rob us of a part of our history — that of a plucky widow who worked with George Washington to design a flag that would come to symbolize a new nation.

Betsy Ross may — or may not — have plied her needle to make the symbol that is embedded into everything that we do and everything that we are. But she, too, is a symbol of the female patriots who played a role in the birth of this nation.

And now, apparently, isn’t worthy to grace the back of an overpriced sneaker.

Sorry, Nike, but you’re hardly wrapping yourselves in glory when you disdain Old Glory.